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:
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.
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