1995 NASSR Conference

The Cultural Legacies of Romanticism

July 20-23, 1995

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Conference Director: James McKusick

Conference Schedule

Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday

Wednesday, July 19

4:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Registration (ECS Atrium)

5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Public Opening of Lawrence Ferlinghetti Art Exhibition

7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Informal Conference Reception (Dorm Lounge)

8:30 pm

Film Series: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (LHIV)

Thursday, July 20: Legacies of British Romanticism

8:00 am - 5:00 pm                                                                      back to top

Registration (ECS Atrium)

9:00 am - 10:30 am

Concurrent Panel Sessions (LHV)

A. Romantic Archaeologies: The Archival Recovery of Women Writers (special session organized by Elizabeth Fay, U. Massachusetts-Boston) (LHV)

1. "Trophies in Triumph: Women Writers and the Romantic Imagination" (Nanora Sweet, U. Missouri-St. Louis)
2. "Inside the Electronic Archive: The Brown Women Writers Project" (Allen Renear and Julia Flanders, Brown U.)
3. "Old England and Romanticism in the Works of Anna Eliza Bray" (Beverly Schneller, Millersville U.)
4. "Who (Dis)Owns Maria Edgeworth: Or, The Transgression and Containment of Cross-Writing" (Mitzi Myers, UCLA)

B. Romantic Literature and Science (special session organized by Stuart Peterfreund, Northeastern U.)

1. "Wordsworth's Visionary Optics" (John T. Ogden, U. Manitoba)
2. "Wordsworth's Landscape of Mind: Debouchment and Sky-Dado" (Nick Rushworth, U. Sydney)
3. "'We Live, and Move, and Have Our Being in the Sun': The Persistence of Romantic Heliolatry in Victorian Physics" (Ted Underwood, Cornell U.)

C. John Keats, Postmodernity, and the Discourse of the Other (Chair: Christopher Strathman, U. Notre Dame)

1. "This Living Hand: Disciplinary Death and the Orphaned 'Immature Poet' (Guinn Batten, Washington U-St. Louis)
2. "Isabella and the Context of Keatsian Romance" (Michael Sider, U. Pennsylvania)
3. "Keats's Orientalism" (Gregory Wassil, American U. in Cairo)

10:30 am - 11:00 am

Refreshments (Atrium)

11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Concurrent Panel Sessions

A. Censorship, Elision, Specularity: Writing Women and the Literary Tradition (special session organized by Elizabeth Fay, U. Massachusetts-Boston) (LHV)

1. "Shakespeare and the Romantic Girl Reader" (Susan Wolfson, Princeton U.)
2. "Forging the Poetical Novel: the Elision of Form in Anna Seward's Louisa" (Daniel Robinson, U. South Carolina)
3. "Specularity and Displa(y)cement in Inchbald, Taylor, and Shelley" (Elizabeth Fay, U. Massachusetts-Boston)
4. "Female Jacobins: Censorship and Women Writers" (Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Columbia U.)

B. Romantic Texts and Paratexts I (special session organized by Paul Magnuson, New York U.)

1. "Document, Work, and Meaning: Sappho and Phaon" (Terence Hoagwood, Texas A&M U.)
2. "Supplements as Editorial Problems: Absence and Coleridge's Preface to 'Kubla Khan'" (Joon-Soo Bong, Yonsei U., Korea)
3. "No Unmeaning Signature: 'This Lime-Tree Bower' in the Annual Anthology" (Paul Magnuson, New York U.)

C. Romantic Negativity: The Poetics of Loss (Chair: John Crosetto, U. Washington)

1. "Shelley and the Poetics of Radical Loss" (Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate School)
2. "Fatal Retraction: Keats and the Apotheosis of the Dead Boy" (Karen Swann, Williams C.)
3. "The Legacy of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery" (Laura Quinney, Princeton U.)

12:45 pm - 2:00 pm

Lunch (Faculty/Staff Dining Hall)

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Concurrent Panel Sessions

A. Romantic Environmentalism (special session organized by Onno Oerlemans, U. Ottawa) (LHV)

1. "P. B. Shelley and Medical Geography: Constructing Pathogenic Environments" (Alan Bewell, U. Toronto)
2. "Shelley's Green Desert" (Timothy Morton, New York U.)
3. "The Economics of Nature: Mab, Mob and Artisan Radical Intellectuals" (David Worrall, St. Mary's U. C.)
4. "Romantic Environmentalism: Wordsworthian Legacies in Abbey and Lopez" (Onno Orlemans, U. Ottawa)

B. Romantic Texts and Paratexts II (special session organized by Paul Magnuson, New York U.)

1. "'To Kill and Bury the Poor Thorn for Ever': Romanticism and Antiromanticism in Wordsworth's 'Thorn' and Mant's 'Simpliciad'" (Priscilla Gilman, Yale U.)
2. "History, Culture, and Aesthetic Economy in Early Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Anthologies"
(Natalie M. Houston, Duke U.) 3. "Collaborative Authorship: John Taylor and the Poems of Clare" (Zachary Leader, Roehampton Institute, London)

C. Boundaries of Female Romantic Discourse (Chair: Heather Frey, Indiana U.)

1. "Maria Edgeworth and Her Fathers: A Study of Literature, Ethnography, and Paternity" (Frances Botkin, U. Illinois at Chicago)
2. "The Picturesque, the Real, and the Consumption of Jane Austen" (William Galperin, Rutgers U.)
3. "'Love's History': L.E.L.'s Grand Tour" (Amanda Gilroy, U. Groningen, Netherlands)

D. Romantic Self-Fashionings (Chair: Kenneth Baldwin, U. Maryland-Baltimore County)

1. "'The Very Spirit Fails': Refiguring the Self in 'Mont Blanc'" (Jonathan Mulroney, Boston U.)
2. "Romantic Self-Fashonings and the Great Masculine Renunciation" (Laura George, Eastern Michigan U.)
3. "Conservative Statesmen and Romantic Historians: Kissinger, Byron, and the Problem of Peace" (Jonathan Gross, DePaul U.)

3:30 pm - 4:00 pm

Refreshments (ECS Atrium)

4:00 pm - 5:15 pm

Plenary Session:

"Living With the Weather" (Jonathan Bate, U. Liverpool) (LHV)

The eruption of Tambora volcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, in 1815 caused a three year period of major climatic disruption which had drastic social consequences: beginning in 1816, known as 'the year without a summer', crop failure led to food riots in nearly every country of Europe. Only in 1819 were there good harvests again. John Keats wrote his ode 'To Autumn' to celebrate them. I shall open with a reading of that poem as a meditation on the inter-relations between climatic change/stability, social conditions and the self. This will then lead to a questioning of the assumption of much recent criticism that Romanticism begins with ideology: I shall argue instead that Romanticism begins with the weather. My reading of Romantic Weather is, however, more material and socialized than that of Arden Reed in his book of that title. Reed is interested in cloud vapors as a deconstructive trope; I am interested in Montesquieu's claim that ideology is determined by the weather.

Verbal echoes demonstrate that a major source for 'To Autumn' was Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight'. I wish to pursue this connection with respect to the fact that both texts are weather poems. I shall argue that weather is in each case the means of linking spatiality and temporality. Le temps means both the time and the weather. Our identities are always constituted in both time and space, are always shaped by both memory and environment. I shall suggest that Romantic poetry is especially concerned with these two constitutions. It is both a mnemonic and an ecologic. A Romantic poem is a model of a certain kind of being and of dwelling; it is weather that mediates between the temporal nature of being and the environmental nature of dwelling.

The paper is about the 'legacy' of Romanticism in that it offers a reading conditioned by our dwelling in a moment of climatic instability (an alternative title might have been 'Romanticism and Global Warming'). but, if there is time, 'legacy' will be demonstrated in another respect in a closing section, which would reveal that Keatsian influence upon the climates of Wallace Stevens.

5:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Dinner (on your own)

7:00 pm

Poetry Reading by Galway Kinnell (Library)
Introduction by Stuart Peterfreund

Friday, July 21: Legacies of European Romanticism

8:00 am - 5:00 pm                                                                             back to top

Registration (ECS Atrium)

9:00 am - 10:30 am

Concurrent Panel Sessions

A. The Legacies of German Romantic Theory I: History, Gender, and the Unconscious (special session organized by Tilottama Rajan, U. Western Ontario) (LHV)

1. "Hegel, Kant and the Political Unconscious (Tilottama Rajan, U. Western Ontario)
2. "Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Historicity" (Gary Handwerk, U. Washington)
3. "Geometries of Reflection: Plato's Diagonals, Hegel's Spirals, and Irigaray's Orbitfolds" (Arkady Plotnitsky, U. Pennsylvania)
4. "Mourning Becomes Theory: Schelling and the Absent Body of Philosophy" (David L. Clark, McMaster U.)

B. Baillie and Byron: Drama, Theater, Censorship (special session organized by Jeffery Cox, Texas A.&M. U.)

1. "Natural Supernaturalism: Joanna Baillie and the Legitimation of Gothic Drama" (Michael Gamer, U. Pennsylvania)
2. "'In Examining Others We Know Ourselves': Joanna Baillie's Exposure of Tragedy" (Claire Miller, U. Texas-Austin)
3. "Cain versus Drury Lane" (Benard Beatty, Liverpool U.)
4. "Byron's Gothic: Cain and the End of Civil Society" (Mark Canuel, Johns Hopkins U.)

C. Romantic Sexualities (special session organized by Sonia Hofkosh, Tufts U.)

1. "Revisiting Romantic Friendship: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Other Intimate Figures" (Amanda Berry, Duke U.)
2. "Negotiating Visions: Spectacle and Fascination in Coleridge and Tennyson" (Bonnie Burns, Tufts U.)
3. "Canonic Texts and Repudiated Masculinities: Romantic Lyricism and the History of Sexuality" (David A. Collings, Bowdoin C.)
4. Respondent (Julie Carlson, U. California–Santa Barbara)

D. Ideological Constructions of the Romantic Legacy (Chair: Jan van Rosevelt, U. South Carolina)

1. "The Romantic Construction of Sappho" (Steven Willett, U. Shizuoka–Hamamatsu, Japan)
2. "Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and the Limited Success of Popularity" (Sarah Zimmerman, U. Wisconsin)
3. "Victorian Shelley: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Poetics (Brian Goldberg, Indiana U.)
4. Respondent (Lisa Vargo, U. Saskatchewan)

10:30 am - 11:00 am

Refreshments (ECS Atrium)

11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Concurrent Panel Sessions

A. The Legacies of German Romantic Theory II: Signification, Alterity and Process (special session organized by Tilottama Rajan, U. Western Ontario) Chair: Anthony J. Harding, U. Saskatchewan (LHV)

1. "Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Dialogic Situation, and Speech as Act" (Angela Esterhammer, U. Western Ontario)
2. "The Topos of Evanescent Sense: Romantic Theory of Tragedy and Contemporary Theory" (Tom McCall, U. Houston-Clear Lake)
3. "Gendering Incomprehensibility: Friedrich Schlegel and the Legacy of Romantic Alterity" (Julie Costello, U. Notre Dame)

B. The Institutional History of Romanticism (special session organized by John Rieder, U. Hawaii-Manoa)

1. "Byron and the Fear of Mass Audiences: Early Romantic Theorists and Trickle Down Theories of Reading" (Timothy Wandling, Stanford U.)
2. "The Institutional Overdetermination of the Concept of Romanticism" (John Rieder, U. Hawaii-Manoa)
3. "The Cases of Shelley in Contemporary Poetics" (Karen Weisman, U. Toronto-Mississauga)

C. Social Reproduction and Male Desire in Frankenstein and The Last Man (Chair: Ghislaine McDayter, Duke U.)

1. "Que(e)rying the Romantic Text: Pursuing Male Desire in Frankenstein" (Ranita Chatterjee, U. of Utah)
2. "'Misery Made Me a Fiend': Social Reproduction in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Owen's Early Writings" (Robert Anderson, Francis Marion U.)
3. "Legacies of The Last Man: Reproductive Paradigms and the Ends of Romantic Discourse" (Christine Cooper, U. Michigan at Ann Arbor)

D. Romanticism and Modern Poetics (Chair: Raphael Falco, U. Maryland-Baltimore County)

1. "'Another Letter to Lord Byron': Modern Formal Poetry and Past Romantic Forms" (Bobbie Jo Allen, Westminster C.)
2. "Keats's Hyperion and the Space=Time Options for Modernism" (Lilach Lachman, Tel Aviv U.)
3. "Logos and Pallaksch: Paul Celan's Response to Hlderlin's Madness in Tbingen, Jnner" (Silke Weineck, U. Pennsylvania)

12:45 pm - 2:00 pm

Lunch (Faculty/Staff Dining Hall)

2:30 pm - 3:45 pm

Plenary Session:

"Romanticism, Postmodernism, and the Local Knowledge Myth" (David Simpson, U. Colorado-Boulder) (LHV)

Abstract: Part of a project on The Academic Postmodern. I will briefly illustrate the (familiar) incidence of the localist imperative in the rhetoric of postmodernity (with Geertz as a skeptical but still affirmative example), situating this paradigm in relation to the new theorization of local/national/global interactions, and in the context of an argued disaggregation of what Gouldner called the "new class".

I will then discuss the tension between the localist component of Romanticism and the 'theory project' also prominent (e.g. as explained by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy). The political analogues and ideologies that went along with this tension will be briefly sketched in relation to a crisis in the national self-image (French Wars, Irish Union) vis a vis empire and community.

I'll go on to analyze the localist emphasis of (some) Romantic pastoral, with remarks on Cobbett and on the localization of women, before presenting a more extended reading of Coleridge's 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' in relation to the postmodern fantasy of particularity (represented here by a Borges story). If there is time, I'll also discuss Wordsworth.

Finally, I'll try to sketch the localist foundations of literature and literary aesthetics, in relation to the ethical/aesthetic methodologies offered by such figures as Rorty, Geertz and Tyler. I am not so much interested in offering any revisionary chronology for the postmodern (the dating game) as in articulating, through some Romantic instances, a sharper inquiry into the ethical assurances offered by the rhetoric of (academic) postmodernity, which I see as tied in rather uncritically with the assumptions and procedures of an institutionalized literature and literary criticism.

4:00 pm - 5:15 pm

Provost's Reception for the Rare Book Exhibition (Library 7th floor)

5:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Dinner (on your own)

7:00 pm - 8:15 pm

Plenary Session:

"The Romantic Origins of the Modern University" (Theodore Ziolkowski, Princeton U.) (LHV)

It is commonly known that the modern American research university had its model in the 19th century German university. What is not fully appreciated, in the current debate over higher education, is the fact that the Humboldtian ideal f research (Forschung) and teaching (Lehre) did not begin in Berlin with Humboldt's reforms but in a series of lectures held in the 1790s in Jena by a group of Romantic intellectuals.

A reappraisal of the university as it was being shaped in Romantic Germany (1789-1815) reveals that it shared not only many of the ideals but also most of the problems of the American university in the 1990s, including the conflict between teaching and research, affirmative action, political correctness, student unrest, faculty discontent, elitist and populist criticism of the institution, increasing professionalism of the student body, and the vagaries of government funding.

Jena was an unlikely site for the radical reform of an institution that had, by the end of the 18th century, fallen into general contempt. For among German universities Jena, the home of the archetypal student drinking sony Gaudeamus igitur, was widely reputed to be the rowdiest. But owing to a number of unusual factors -- including, paradoxically, notoriously low faculty salaries and the nearby presence of Goethe in Weimar--Jena was able to attract a constellation of rising academic stars: Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others. These intellectuals formulated in their inaugural lectures the theory upon which Humboldt's university in Berlin was later based.

First, all of these theorists presented knowledge as a unified whole in contrast to the encyclopedic view of the Enlightenment. Second, they understood the universe of knowledge not merely as a synchronic whole but as a diachronic process -- as a history in which each individual wins his place through the act of creative scholarship. Third, their view of the university led all three to distinguish rigorously between the rightful citizens of the world of knowledge and those who do not belong in such lofty surroundings. All three, finally, locate philosophy at the center of the curriculum in an effort to provide the unified view that would bring together the previously disparate fields of the arts and sciences as well as the professions of law, medicine, and theology.

Through an equally improbable set of circumstances Berlin turned out to be the place where this Romantic ideal of the university was first realized. That is was soon torn apart by tensions familiar on our campuses today is a sobering lesson for the present.

8:30 pm

Film Series: Andrey Tarkovsky's Mirror (LHV)

Saturday, July 22: Other Romanticisms, Other Legacies

8:00 am - 5:00 pm                                                                                 back to top

Registration (ECS Atrium)

9:00 am - 10:30am

Concurrent Panel Sessions

A. Romantic Representations of the Non-Western World (special session organized by Alan Richardson, Boston C.) (LHV)

1. "Worlds Not Realized" (Alan Richardson, Boston C.)
2. "Veiled Opposition: Thomas Moore's Orientalism" (Susan B. Taylor, U. Colorado-Colorado Springs)
3. "The Nation Without Organs: De Quincey's Sinophobic Investment in Animality" (Daniel O'Quinn, Cornell U.)
4. "Mimetic Resistance and the Sexual Politics of Race: A Reading of Kleist's The Engagement in Santo Domingo" (Elke Heckner, Johns Hopkins U.)

B. The Legacy of the Gothic I: Romantic Transformations of the Gothic (special session organized by Jerrold E. Hogle, U. Arizona)

1. "Introduction: The Gothic Legacy" (Jerrold E. Hogle, U. Arizona)
2. "Changing the Gothic from Within: Mary Wollstonecraft (Candace Ward, U. Alabama)
3. "Reviving the Vampire: Byron, Polidori, and Literary Appropriation" (Michael Macovski, Fordham U.)
4. "Monstrous Beauty: Frankenstein, Monstrosity, and Film" (James A. W. Heffernan, Dartmouth C.)

C. Twentieth-Century Representations of Romanticism (special session organized by Jan M. Mieszkowski and Matthew T. Hartman, Johns Hopkins U.)

1. "Carl Schmitt: Fascism and the Political Critique of Romanticism" (Jacqueline LeBlanc, U. Massachusetts- Amherst)
2. "Adorno's Concept of Truth: Art, Autonomy and Utopia" (William D. Melaney, Skidmore C.)
3. "Constructing Infinity: Reflections and Representations in W. Benjamin's The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism" (Catherine Grimm, Northwestern U.)

D. Labor, Indolence, and the Making of Romanticism (Chair: Gregory Jerozal)

1. "Resisting Labor: Indolence and the Language of Agriculture in Coleridge's Poetry and Prose" (Rachel Crawford, U. San Francisco)
2. "Slave Labor and Poetic Production: Keats's Monstrous Eve" (Debbie Lee, U. Arizona)
3. "Wild Edifices and Well-Furnished Purses: the Economics of the Irrational in Frances Burney's The Wanderer" (Grant Campbell)

10:30 am - 11:00 am

Refreshments (ECS Atrium)

11:00am - 12:30 pm

Concurrrent Panel Sessions

A. Representations of Anglo-European Romanticism Outside Great Britain and Europe (special session organized by Orrin N.C. Wang, U. Maryland-College Park) (LHV)

1. "Uncivilized Romantics: Japanese Romanticism's Ambivalent Relationship to the West" (Kevin Doak, U. Illinois-Urbana-Champaign)
2. "The Literary Resolution of the India Question: John Stuart Mill and the Colonial Romance" (Henry Schwarz, Georgetown U.)
3. "European Romanticism and Indian Nationalism: the legacies of Sir William Jones" (Babak Elahi, U. Rochester)
4. "The Romantic Modern and Third World Modernity" (Saree Makdisi, U. Chicago)

B. The Legacy of the Gothic II: The Gothic Relocated and Reconceived (special session organized by Jerrold E. Hogle, U. Arizona)

1. "Recasting the Gothic Legacy: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Joanna Bailie's Orra" (Marjean D. Purinton, Texas Tech U.)
2. "The Anti-Slavery Movement and De Quincey's 'Savannah-La-Mar': The Historical Origins of the Urban Gothic Topos" (Charles J. Rzepka, Boston U.)
3. "Victorian Nightmares: Empowering Spectators in Transformations of Fuseli" (Troy Boone, U. California-Santa Cruz)
4. Response: "What the Gothic Cathects" (Jerrold E. Hogle, U. Arizona)

C. Romanticism High and Low I (special session organized by Neil Fraistat, U Maryland-College Park)

1. "Radical Legacies: Monumentality and the Discourse of Political Reform" (Kevin Gilmartin, California Institute of Technology)
2. "The Black Dwarf and Satiric Performance; or The Instabilities of the 'Public Square'" (Steven E. Jones, Loyola U.)
3. "High Theory, Low Theory: The Frankfurt School and Cultural Studies" (Jon Klancher, Boston U.)

D. Where Is French Romanticism? (special session organized by Bridget Keegan, Samford U.)

1. "Gendering French Romanticism: The Macropolitics of Stal's Gendering Germany" (Ann T. Gardiner, New York U.)
2. "Trailing Rousseau: Narrative and the Reading of Our Past" (Mauritz Royce Kallerud, SUNY-Buffalo)
3. "Kindred Shapes of Solitude: Rousseau, Romanticism and the Misreading of Influence" (Nancy Yousef, Columbia U.)
4. "Stendhal's Armance: A Disruption of the Romantic Discourse" (Joan Cremin, U. Washington)

12:45 pm - 2:00 pm

Lunch (ECS Atrium)

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Concurrent Panel Sessions

A. Romantic Nationalisms (special session organized by Alan Bewell, U. Toronto) (LHV)

1. "The Need for National Standards: Charles William Pasley, British Military Reform, and the Centralization of Administration" (Lee Erickson, Marshall U.)
2. "Romanticism, Nationhood and Nationalism–Polarities in the Thought of Herder, Schleiermacher and Coleridge" (Mary Anne Perkins, Kingston U.)
3. "A Romance Postponed: National and Domestic Detours in The Heart of Midlothian" (Carolyn F. Austin, U. California-Irvine)

B. Shape, Agency, and Excess (special session organized by Theresa Kelley, U. Texas-Austin)

1. "Misery's Chill Arms and the Scribal Hand: Shelley's Material for Personification" (Nancy M. Goslee, U. Tennessee)
2. "Shelley, History, and Figural Excess" (Frederick C. Hoerner, U. Texas-Austin)
3. "'Unutterable Monsters and Abortions': Oriental Imagery and Aesthetic Ideology in De Quincey's Confessions" (William Musgrave, U. California-Berkeley)
4. "Paranoia Historicized: Legal Fantasy, Social Charge, and Satiric Metacommentary in the Context of the 1794 Treason Trials" (Thomas Pfau, Duke U.)

C. Romanticism High and Low II (special session organized by Neil Fraistat, U. Maryland-College Park)

1. "The Cockney School of Poetry: Keats in the Suburbs" (Elizabeth Jones, U. Ottawa)
2. "Eating Blake, or an Essay on Taste: The Case of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon" (Nicholas Williams, Indiana U.)
3. "'Out of Scott a Bad Tradition Came": Reading Women's Historical Romances" (Angela Keane, U. Salford)

D. Romantic Canon Formation (Chair: Melissa Sites, U. Maryland–College Park)

1. "The Gendering of Romantic Canons" (Greg Kucich, U. Notre Dame)
2. "Genre, Periodization, and Aesthetic Value in the Anthology: A Case Study of Anna Laetitia Barbauld" (Pamela Plimpton, U. Oregon)
3. "Masculine Imagination and Feminine Fancies" (Donelle Ruwe, U. Notre Dame)

4:00 pm - 5:15 pm

Plenary Session:

"The Failure of Romanticism" (Jerome McGann, U. Virginia) (LHV)

Loss, failure, unsuccess: no subject or emotional constellation consumes greater attention or imaginative energy among Romantic poets, their precursors, and their inheritors. this talk centers in the deeply problematic character of those subjects as they are taken up by the poets. It traces out the Romantic representation of the theme of loss and failure, in particular the failure of (Romantic) art both as a cultural ideal and as a set of particular cultural practices. It begins by considering three types of Romantic loss: Wordsworthian, Byronic, and Keatsian. It then retreats to consider the context in which these formations developed -- specifically, within the discourses of sentimentality and sensibility. The final part of the discussion takes up certain late-romantic appropriations of these subjects by Hemans and Landon in particular. Here, it is argued, the thematic and emotional constellation receives its fullest and most reflexive form of expression.

5:15 pm - 5:45pm

Refreshments (ECS Atrium)

5:45 pm - 7:00 pm

Plenary Session:

"Jeremy Bentham and How to Do Things with People"

(Frances Ferguson, Johns Hopkins U.) (LHV)

This paper discusses Bentham's attempt to reorient government by focusing on how groups may help to shape individual action. It particularly treats the differences between the appeal to tradition (which recommends actions because of their effects in the past) and Bentham's Romantic liberalism (which tries to redefine individuals through artificial environments). It concludes by talking about why visibility becomes particularly important to such artificial environments and suggests a relationship between the current debates about pornography and the implications of Bentham's account for our understanding of individuality.

7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Fine Arts Gallery Reception: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Art Exhibition

8:00 pm

Conference Banquet (Ballroom)

Sunday, July 23: The Future of Romanticism

10:00 am - 11:45 am                                                                 back to top

Concurrent Panel Sessions

A. Film, Subjectivity, and the Romantic Legacy (special session organized by Robert Kolker, U. Maryland-College Park) (LHV)

1. "The Self in History: Wordsworth, Tarkovsky and Autobiography" (David S. Miall, Alberta U.)
2. "Dreaming Awake: 'The Eve of St. Agnes' in Vertigo" (Susan Duhig, Southern Illinois U.)
3. Respondent (Philip Landon, U. Maryland-Baltimore County)

B. Romantic and Post-Romantic Subjectivities (special session organized by Theresa Kelley, U. Texas at Austin)

1. "The Sublime as Super-Genre of the Modern, or Hamlet in Revolution: Caleb Williams and His Problems" (Robert Kaufman, McGill U.)
2. "Manuscript and Quotation Mark: The Triumph of Life and the Excess of Romantic Subjectivity" (Joel Faflak, U. Western Ontario)
3. "The Romantic Subject and the Betrayals of the Text" (Anthony J. Harding, U. Saskatchewan)
4. "The Ethics of Subjectivity in Coleridge and Lacan" (J. Andrew Hubbell, U. Maryland-College Park)

C. The Future of Romantic Poetics (Chair: Nigel James Alderman, Duke U.)

1. "The Anatomy of Antiromanticism" (William Jewett, Yale U.)
2. "Byron, Wordsworth and the (Post-Structuralist?) Future of Romantic Poetics" (Josh Gidding, C. of Holy Cross)
3. "Romantic Relativities, or a Prelude to Physical Criticism" (Mark Lussier, Arizona State U.)

11:45 am

Refreshments (ECS Atrium)

12:00 noon - 1:30 pm

Business Meeting (optional, for interested NASSR members) (Faculty/Staff Dining Hall)