ROMANTICISM AT EDGE HILL Summer 2010 programme Tuesday 1 June Dr Essaka Joshua (Notre Dame University) 'What Disability Studies can do for Romanticism' Tuesday 8 June Prof. Kelly Hurley (University of Colorado at Boulder) 'Traumatophilia' Tuesday 22 June Dr Christine Kenyon-Jones (King's College, London) 'Deformity Transformed: Byron's Lameness' All welcome 5 - 7 p.m., room M 44, main building Edge Hill University St Helens Road Ormskirk Lancashire L39 4QP e-mail or 'phone for further details: [log in to unmask] 01695 650 942/4 ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Essaka Joshua, 'What Disability Studies Can Do for Romanticism' In spite of its centrality to the lives of many people of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, physical disability remains at the margins of Romantic studies and only a few aspects of this topic have reached the mainstream. Using the example of William Wordsworth's "The Discharged Soldier", this paper will attempt to define a Disability Studies approach to Romanticism, exposing the ways in which non-Disability Studies approaches to the period place limitations on our understanding of disability. While there is much that is problematic about the Romantic engagement with disability, there is, nonetheless, much about the Romantic agenda that anticipates the values that the disability-rights movement has come to promote: equality and tolerance, changing concepts of ability, and the concept of the enabling imagination. Disability Studies shares with Romantic Studies an interest in tracing the grievances and triumphs of the disenfranchised, exiled and marginalized, in identifying emerging concepts of relational selfhood, in rejecting idealized and perfected imitations of nature, in valuing the expressive subject and life-writing as a mode of self-expression, and in the multiplicity of the meanings of the human body. Romantic emotion is often figured as disablement, and the Romantic imagination is frequently a compensatory response to the frailties of the human body. Wordsworth anticipates modern concepts of intrusive gazing, and grapples with the social and individual complexities of, what Disability Studies has come to term, "charitable models." In this extraordinary age of revolutionary ways of thinking, emergent concepts of direct significance to modern disability consciousness are everywhere in the ideas of the period. Essaka Joshua teaches at the University of Notre Dame and is the author of The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (Ashgate, 2007) and Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Ashgate, 2001). She is currently writing a monograph on physical disability in British Romanticism. Kelly Hurley, 'Traumatophilia' The 2007 film The Mist offers up two versions of the spectacle of the human subject in extremis. In the first, human bodies are destroyed by a variety of otherworldly monsters: ripped apart, burrowed through, burst open, sucked dry, injected with venom so that they blacken and swell. In the second, the protagonist screams in anguish after shooting his fellow survivors, including his young son, to save them from the prospect of such a terrible death, then falls to his knees in a paroxysm of despair and screams harder when he realizes that rescue was imminent and he killed his son needlessly. By juxtaposing these two scenarios - of a human subject taken to pieces and dying in screeching agony, and of a human subject convulsed with unbearable grief - The Mist solicits affective intensity in two registers, and invites the spectator to partake of the uneasy pleasure characteristically offered by Gothic Horror in the one case, and melodrama in the other. Moreover, it suggests that the two types of affective intensity are somehow transferable, perhaps interchangeable - at least at the level of phantasy. In this paper, I will be concerned with the figure of the 'subject-in-anguish' in both modes, the horrific and the melodramatic, and with the elusive but intimate relationship between the spectator and this figure. I am particularly interested in reading this relationship through trauma theory. Trauma theory describes experience that so violates subjective boundaries, so unsettles psychic coherence, that the traumatized subject cannot be free of it, returning compulsively to the unbearable experience again and again but unable to grasp it, to move beyond it. To the extent that popular cinema represents the spectator's own traumatic experiences at several removes, we may consider popular cinema spectatorship as a form of 'traumatophilia' for a spectator posited as already traumatized to some degree, at some level, and held in thrall by a trauma he or she will never master. Kelly Hurley teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is the author of 'Science and the Gothic', in The Edinburgh Companion to the Victorian Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and 'The Victorian Mummy-Fetish: H. Rider Haggard, Frank Aubrey, and the White Mummy', in Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain (Ohio State University Press, 2008). She is currently writing a monograph on identity-formation in SF and horror cinema. Christine Kenyon-Jones, 'Deformity Transformed: Byron's Lameness' 'Illustrated by a wide range of portraits of Byron, and by a review of Byron's own writing on this topic, this paper considers Byron's lameness as a social construct and an element of visual and verbal Byronism, as well as a physical fact.' Christine Kenyon Jones is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at King's College London. Her research has focused on representations of animals in Romantic-period writing; on Byron and his portraits, and on Byron's and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's disability. Her books include Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-period Writing (2001) and Byron: The Image of the Poet (editor, 2008) and other publications include those on Romanticism and religion; on food and eating; on science fiction and Romantic biofictions. She is currently working on a study of pronunciation during the Romantic period. ********************************************************* British Association for Romantic Studies http://www.bars.ac.uk To advertise Romantic literature conferences, publications, jobs, or other events that the BARS members would be interested in, please contact Neil Ramsey <[log in to unmask]> Also use this address to register any change in your e-mail address, or to be removed from the list. Messages are held in archives, along with other information about the Mailbase at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/bars.html *********************************************************