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Special Sessions
- Jews and the Work of Romanticism
Although it is generally recognized that Jews played a significant role in the modern labor movement, little “work” has been done on the antecedents of that phenomenon. Therefore, the panel “Jews and the Work of Romanticism” invites papers that approach the subject from a variety of angles, including, but not limited to: Working Jews; the kinds of work performed by the Jews during the Romantic Period; particular Jewish laborers; laws that affected Jewish labor; Romantic influences on the Jewish labor movement. Other possibilities include Romantic works by and/or about Jews. Given the international focus of ICR, papers will not be limited by time, place or genre, but can consider the broader implications of the interactions between Romanticism and the Jews, in terms of the conference topic.
Submit abstracts or queries to Sheila Spector @ sheilaspector@msn.com. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. The deadline is April 15th.
- The Work of Reading: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Difficulty
This session will include papers on writers who utilize techniques that make their works difficult to read, and writers whose work was deemed by contemporaries to be difficult. Critical discussion largely neglects the phenomenon that emerges in the Romantic period—famously articulated by Wordsworth's opposition of "the real language of men" against "poetic diction" in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads—where some writers consciously choose difficult styles and techniques (including Blake, Percy Shelley, and Coleridge's Prose and Rime) while others strive for relative clarity (including Thomas Paine, Wordsworth, and Jane Austen). The significance of this phenomenon reaches beyond aesthetics, as it reveals much about the changing politics of reading and writing in a growing commercial marketplace and about the changing relationship of authors to their reading public. Papers may address a range of questions, including, for example, critiques of the obscurity of the Lake Poets by Byron and the reviewers, the effect of the emerging mass audience on the production of literature, the gendering of difficulty and clarity, the association of difficulty with the Orient, and the contrasting epistemologies of difficult and clear texts.
Submit abstracts or queries to Darren Howard at dhoward@willamette.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- The Labor of Lyric
While often professing to be a form in which a seamlessness or an ease
between language and speaker is captured—a form of so-called
“self-expression,” that is—Romantic lyricism in fact often precisely
bears the marks of its own preoccupations with craft, work, effort, and
labor. This panel welcomes proposals that seek to frame the various
practices of Romantic lyricism as forms of work or labor.
Submit abstracts or queries to Magdalena Ostas at mostas@fau.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- Romanticism and the Work of Empire
This session will examine the work that Romanticism has been made to do in the colonies or post-colonies. Papers could consider either the work that colonizers made Romanticism do in re-figuring the native or the work that native writers have made romanticism do in resisting the colonial endeavor. How have the tropes, the images of authors, re-figurations or re-tellings of the works of the romantics, been a useful tool on either the side of colonial occupation or that of resistance. Topics could include, but are not limited to, the inclusion of or re-reading of figures or poems from romantic authors in the work of colonial or post-colonial writers for ideological purposes, the use of romantic authors in colonial education, visits from romantic figures to the colonies, or the use of romantic ideals, philosophies, or aesthetic categories by the colonizer to re-shape native identities.
Submit abstracts or queries to Stephen Hancock at seh36@byuh.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- Black Romanticism
Does Transatlantic Romanticism somehow change south of Virginia? How does a Caribbean version of Romanticism differ, if at all, from American or British Romanticism? What representations of slavery by British Romantic poets and novelists fomented real political change? Which literary forms best lent themselves to disruptions of the slave trade and to the promotion of emancipation? How have the "rediscoveries" of the narratives of Olaudah Equiano, the Hart Sisters, Robert Wedderburn, Mary Prince, and Mary Seacole changed the field of Romanticism? (For example, does our consideration of these autobiographical texts expand the notion of Romantic individualism beyond the common Enlightenment-Era idea of freedom?) What other newly rediscovered early "Black Atlantic" authors will be the focus of our attention in the coming decades?
Submit abstracts or queries to Josh Brewer at brewer0@purdue.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- The Burdens of Beasts: Working Animals in Romantic Poetry
Animals play marked roles in Romantic poetry, from Blake’s famous “tyger,” Coleridge’s albatross, Shelley’s skylark, Keats’s nightingale, and Wordsworth’s butterfly to less familiar examples, such as John Clare’s badger or Felicia Hemens’s blue anemone. How are animals used particularly in Romantic works? How do they work through the poem’s context, form, theme, or subject and thereby shift the language and the effect for the reader? How is society’s contemporary perspective of animals addressed in the poem? Does the animal subject in a poem represent nature and its relation to the speaker, or is it distinct from nature in the work? In what ways can scholars discern the significance of animal subjects in Romantic poetry?
Submit abstracts or queries to Lisbeth Chapin at chapin.L@gmc.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- Lyric and the Resistance to Work
In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth speaks ruefully of his poems’ “feeble effort” against the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” caused by the working lives of men in cities. He locates one form of this resistance in his poems’ emphasis on feeling over the narrative teleology towards “extraordinary incident”; many of the ballads juxtapose scenes of idleness against the Preface's larger claim for their "worthy purpose." And while he specifies that purpose as the “illustration” of how ideas and feelings are associated in a state of excitement, the poems’ focus on reticent or inarticulate characters often seems to illustrate only by way of obscurity, leaving the mind to “work” with what Wordsworth will call in the Prelude “a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being.”
Recent work on Romantic lyric in and beyond Wordsworth has often found in the apparent weakness of its efforts, in its ineptitude rather than sovereignty, its passivity, reticence, grace or insignificance, a source of lyric’s resilience. In the face of instrumentalizing demands—for sensation, lucidity, disclosure or expression—what we might call a lyric resistance to work is bound up with the genre's present urgency. How do lyric poems in the Romantic period resist such demands? How do they enable the articulation of non-instrumental forms of agency or knowledge?
We seek papers on Romantic-period poets that address the lyric genre's various relation to conceptual work. Proposals that treat the theoretical work performed and resisted in the critical formations of romanticists after de Man are also encouraged.
Submit abstracts or queries to Eric Lindstrom at Eric.Lindstrom@uvm.edu and Eric Idsvoog at idsvoog@fas.harvard.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- Work in Goethe
Work as a multifaceted topic informs Goethe’s oeuvre from his early poems, such as “Prometeus,” throughout his novels and all the way to Faust II. This session invites proposals on all aspects of work in any of Goethe’s texts, their manners of presentation as well as implication. For example, the significance of occupation, profession, self-determination and creation for individual and social identity formation would be of great interest. All critical/theoretical approaches are welcome.
Submit abstracts or queries to Ingrid Broszeit-Rieger at rieger@oakland.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- The Text as Political Work
In this special session, we will consider how texts work to achieve political aims. Many writers during the Romantic period constructed texts to reflect their political leanings and ideologies. Writers such as Coleridge (in his Bristol Lectures), Equiano (in his anti-slavery text), Pringle (in his South African poetry), and Shelley sometimes used their texts in an attempt to influence the reading public. The text thus became a political work that often called for political reflection and change. In this panel, we will investigate the works of writers who used their texts as appeals for political change and we will consider how texts become vehicles for political activism.
Submit abstracts or queries to Sharon L. Joffe at sljoffe@ncsu.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- Love’s Labors: Romantic Polyamorousness
This panel engages with 18th and 19th-century literary and cultural manifestations of polyamorousness. Whereas polyamory denotes multiple sexual-erotic engagements, polyamorousness attends to the more diffuse and varied affective relations between people that may exceed a primary focus on genital sexuality. We invite abstracts which explore the qualities, attitudes, and practices through which novelists, poets, theologians, artists, and politicians imagined and/or participated in sexual and textual intercourse with more than one partner simultaneously. In essence, this panel will explore some of the emotional, ethical, legal, religious, and geopolitical ramifications of having and negotiating multiple erotic attachments from the mid-18th through the mid-19th century. We wish to consider the cultural and psycho-sexual labor that went into questioning and rewriting Romantic constructions of intimacy--especially given the ongoing historical shifts in defining sexuality and subjectivity in revolutionary-era Europe. What might it mean, for instance, to place P.B. Shelley's axiom in Epipsychidion that “True Love in this differs from gold and clay, / That to divide is not to take away” within political discussions and legal battles over courtship rituals and flirtation; marriage and friendship; divorce and adultery; prostitution and cicisbeism; and, finally, libertinism and concubinage? We welcome investigations both fictional and (auto)biographical into the establishment, maintenance, and nature of--as well as challenges to--polyamorous relations between figures and texts in the Romantic century or Long Age of Sensibility (1750-1850).
Submit abstracts or queries to Christopher Nagle at christopher.nagle@wmich.edu and Courtney Wennerstrom at cwenners@indiana.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- Working the Body, Expanding the Mind
In Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry his justification for the power of sublime experience derives from his notion of the necessity of bodily exercise. For Burke, the experience of the sublime becomes both analogous to physical labor as an “exercise of the finer parts of the system” and dependent on physical work. The work of bodily organs to take in the world around them produces an analogous intellectual work that allows the experiencing subject to escape the various threats that accompany too much rest of the body’s system. “The mind is bounded by the bounds of the object,” Burke writes, and the exertion required by the experience of the sublime produces not only the possibility of mental health but also an intellectual exercise that expands the mind.
This panel seeks papers that explore the relationship between bodily work - understandable as labor, exercise, the act of perception, the dynamics of the nervous system, etc. - and intellectual work. How do Romantic period thinkers respond to or repeat Burke’s implicit assumption that bodily exercise leads to intellectual expansion? What is the relationship between bodily and intellectual work in the Romantic period?
Submit abstracts or queries to Erin Goss at egoss@loyola.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- The Romantic Work of Travel Literature
What is a work of travel literature? How does Romanticism inform the work of travel literature? What were the destinations of Romantic travelers and why? When studied within the context of cosmopolitanism, “contact zones,” the Orient, the Other, and nation building, how does a Romantic piece of travel writing differ from travel writing of different periods? Is Romantic travel literature necessarily “sentimental” travel literature? Is travel writing its own genre or can works from other genres be considered travel writing? These questions and hopefully more will inform a session on travel literature of the Romantic era.
Submit abstracts or queries to Jennifer Law-Sullivan at law@oakland.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. Deadline is April 15.
- Real Workers Writing Romantically
During the Romantic period working-class authors expressed their experience in forms that both mirrored and resisted middle and upper class constructions of the picturesque poor. John Clare, Robert Bloomfield, William Blake and Ann Yearsley all developed rhetorical techniques for drawing on the authority their work experiences had given them, yet they had to negotiate readers’ expectations (moral, aesthetic, linguistic) for the representation of working-class experiences. This panel invites papers that consider the ways these authors or other laboring authors in the period affirmed or modified middle and upper class presentations of working-class life. Papers that make new contributions to old areas of inquiry (Clare’s use of dialect, Yearsley’s denunciation of the slave trade) are welcome as well as papers that look at less examined authors and themes. What did Romantic period workers say about their own lives, and how? What does it mean for an author to be a “real worker” or to “write romantically”?
Please submit abstracts or queries to Cassandra Falke at cfalke@etbu.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. The deadline is April 15th.
- Creative Labor and the Female Body in Literature around 1800
In fiction and theory written around 1800, authors often described their creative work using metaphors of the female body: the pregnant body, the child-bearing body, or the nursing mother among others. How did female authors of the time describe their creative work? How did they work within this gendered perception of creativity? This panel seeks papers which contemplate women authors and their metaphors of the female body as creative labor in fiction or theory.
Submit abstracts or queries to Pamela Tesch @ tesch@oakland.edu. Be sure to submit an additional abstract to r2anders@oakland.edu, indicating that you have submitted the abstract to this session. The deadline is April 15th.
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