2007 BARS/NASSR Conference
Hosted by the Centre for Romantic Studies, University of Bristol
Invited Special Sessions
Scholars wishing to submit a proposal for consideration by the Special
Session convenor should e-mail an abstract of no more than 300 words by
November 17, 2006.
All abstracts for the invited special sessions will be vetted by the session
convenor. Rejected abstracts will then be forwarded to the conference
committee for vetting as a single abstract.
"Are we free to speak of freedom?" Philosophical and Theoretical
Articulations
Session Convenor: David L. Clark (Professor, McMaster University)
In what ways is Romanticism the site of philosophical conceptions and
theoretical articulations in which "freedom" is radically reconsidered?
Emphasis will be given to those reconsiderations that are arguably still
underway. Possible topics include: autonomy and automatization; human
beings, machine-life, and animality; liberty, fraternity, and friendship;
freedom and/of/from the inhuman; leading strings and thinking for oneself;
the moral law and other necessities; academic freedom and the
university without condition; unconditional sovereignty and the rights of
citizens; "the right to say everything, or to keep it secret;" spheres and
counter-spheres of liberty; judgment and (dis)interested pleasures;
dependence, habit, and addiction; the culture of discipline and the
despotism of desire; enslaved, emancipated, and post-autonomous subjects;
grounds, grounding, and groundlessness; declarations of dependence and
independence.
"Philosophy" and "theory" are here broadly conceived, ranging from canonical
philosophical work of the period to non-philosophical texts that are
characterized by lineages, inflections, questions, and moves that are deemed
to be "philosophical" and "theoretical." Proposals from a wide range of
methodologies, disciplines, and languages are warmly welcomed. Please send
300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor David L. Clark at
[log in to unmask] by 17 November, 2006.
Charlotte Smith's Posthumous Works
Session Convenor: Jacqueline Labbe (Professor, Department of English and
Comparative Studies, University of Warwick)
2007 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Beachy Head: with Other
Poems and The Natural History of Birds. Smith's death in 1806 meant that
her last two works were published without her customary and
dearly-maintained control over their content and paratexts. Papers are
invited that explore the impact of these posthumous works on Smith's
reputation, then and now; that contend with the texts' concern with science
and politics; that situate the texts as late Smith and High Romantic; or
other approaches relevant to the conference theme.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Jacqueline Labbe at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
The Crisis of Phenomenology
Session Convenor: Tilottama Rajan (Canada Research Chair, University of
Western Ontario)
1807 saw both the publication of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the
battle of Jena which destroyed the University of Jena, putting existing
notions of freedom in doubt. Papers are invited that deal with the
"Phenomenology", other texts by Hegel (e.g. Aesthetics or Philosophy of
Nature), or other thinkers in dialogue with Hegel (e.g. Schelling). Possible
topics include freedom in history; art and freedom; the concept of absolute
knowledge; the university without condition (in Derrida's
phrase) and the place of philosophy in the post-Kantian university; and
whether philosophy frees other fields from the discourse networks in which
they are embedded.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Tilottama Rajan at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
Free Blake
Session convenor: Angela Esterhammer (Distinguished University Professor,
University of Western Ontario)
The 250th anniversary of Blake's birth provides the occasion for a very
special session in conjunction with the conference theme "Emancipation,
Liberation, Freedom." Abstracts are invited on forms and varieties of
freedom in Blake's work: political, religious, imaginative, generic,
linguistic, legal, philosophical, interpretative, pedagogical; also, freedom
of movement, speech, or action in Blake's writing and art.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Angela Esterhammer at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
Liberating music
Session Convenor: Marshall Brown (Professor, University of Washington)
Music of the Romantic decades was breaking into new territory and hence
often associated with revolutionary sensibilities. Yet the constraints from
which it was being liberated were often socially signifying practices.
Absolute music earned the reputation for being above the fray. I welcome
submissions concerning these two aspects of music, separately or in tension
with one another: as liberating discourse and as liberated from discourse.
Papers may focus on musical works, musical aesthetics,
or cultural milieus; they should in any event be in dialogue with and
addressed to scholars from the various disciplines represented in
NASSR/BARS.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail - in either Word or WordPerfect for
PC - to Professor Marshall Brown at: [log in to unmask] by November 17,
2006.
Liberating Beethoven
Session Convenor: Daniel Chua (Reader in Music Theory and Analysis, King's
College London)
Beethoven's music is almost synonymous with freedom. Yet the nature of this
freedom has been ambiguous, with opposing ideologies adopting Beethoven's
music as their mouthpiece. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the
Parisian audiences heard the victorious finale of the Fifth Symphony as
their revolution, whereas a hundred years later the National Socialists in
Germany heard it as their Führer. Is freedom, then, merely an empty concept
or does it specify something about the music and
its cultural reception? I welcome historical, philosophical or music
analytical papers that deal critically with these issues.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Dr Daniel Chua at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
Liberating Gothic
A Special Session organised by the German Society for English Romanticism
**proposals welcome from everywhere**
Session Convenor: Franz Meier (Professor, Department of English Literature
and Culture, University of Braunschweig)
The Gothic genre, due to its popularity, has often been considered as
culturally affirmative and politically conservative. As early as 1800, on
the other hand, the Marquis de Sade (in his "Idée sur les Romans")
associated the Gothic Novel with the political ideals of the French
Revolution and its cultural climate of upheaval and excess. This session is
not limited to such political connections, however, but also aims to
investigate the broader relationships between the Gothic and concepts of
liberation, emancipation and freedom. Papers are therefore invited from a
wide range of theoretical positions to investigate the liberating and
potentially subversive aspects of a popular genre in the fields of class,
religion, power, censorship, race, gender, sexuality etc. - and need not be
limited to the literary genre of the novel.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Franz Meier at:
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
Madame de Staël and the invention of 'Romanticism'
Session Convenor: Caroline Franklin (Professor, University of Wales Swansea)
'The first female writer of this, perhaps of any age', as Byron described
her, was the most celebrated avant garde French theorist of the year 1807:
philosopher, artist, political intriguer and exiled intellectual. Her
extraordinary novel Corinne, ou L'Italie set the agenda for the new century
in debates on whether there was necessarily any relationship between
national culture and the state; the role of woman in society; and concerning
its extravagant self-portrait of the suffering artist.
Could it be argued that Staël and her circle invented the concept of
'Romanticism'? How did her writings test the limits of individual freedom?
To celebrate the bi-centenary of the publication of Corinne, ou L'Italie,
we invite 20-minute papers re-assessing the significance of Madame de
Staël and exploring topics such as:
marriage enthusiasm conversation suicide liberalism
national character travel writing epistolary fiction
representations of Italy salon culture the novel of sentiment
Rousseau Napoleon female friendship the novel of ideas
literary influences art history cosmopolitanism the north and
the south spontaneity
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Caroline Franklin at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
"Public Romanticism: A Session to Honour Paul Magnuson"
Session Convenor: Nicholas Halmi (Associate Professor, University of
Washington)
This session, honouring the memory of Paul Magnuson, will address the
subject of his last monograph, British Romantic poetry as a contribution to
public discourse in the period. Submissions are invited on all aspects of
the ways in which Romantic poems and their particular modes of publication
(inlcuding "paratexts" such as prefaces and notes) refer to and constitute
part of a larger public discourse of (in Paul's words) "politics and
aesthetics, nationalism and domesticity, morality and
sexuality, law and legitimacy."
Please email 300-word abstracts (no attachments, please) to Nicholas Halmi
at [log in to unmask] by 17 November 2006.
Whose Freedom?
Session Convenor: Christoph Bode (Professor, LMU Munich)
This session problematizes the relationship between generalized
philosophical concepts of freedom and their significant qualification and
reduction in anthropological treatises of the late 18th century. The
tension, for example, between Kant's three Critiques on the one hand and his
maybe lesser known speculations about history, anthropology, race or about
the concrete limitations to aesthetic experience on the other, raises
questions about the universality of key concepts of the Enlightenment,
about inclusiveness and exclusiveness, and about the possibilities of
salvaging an undeniably liberating, revolutionary legacy that seems at the
same time--because of its implicit and sometimes even glaringly obvious
suprematism--deeply compromised and tinged with a self-justifying
Eurocentrism. Papers will explore the interfaces of philosophy,
anthropology, and cultural history and trace the processing of these
discourses in the literature of the times.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Christoph Bode at:
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
Visual Freedoms? New Approaches to Romantic Visual Culture
Session Convenor: Luisa Calè (Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London)
The rhetoric of freedom and its opposites articulates the place of the
visual in Romantic ideology. No longer 'locked up' and 'confined to the
apartments of Nobles, or the palaces of Kings', pictures are set loose to
wander in the new public sphere of art thanks to the dissemination of prints
and the opening of exhibitions to the general public (1760s-). But despite
its new venues and publics, the suggestion that such public visual culture
might participate in the free play of the imagination
has been stifled by the suspicion that its new venues are but sites of
'panoptic surveillance', 'exhibitionary complexes' for social control and
reproduction. When the visual is allowed a space of freedom - freedom from
the limitations of the body, the senses, the materiality of texts or media
specificity - it opens up a realm of disembodied images, projections,
simulations, phantasmagorias. This figural space has been sometimes read as
a Freudian return of the visual, sometimes as the effect
of a disempowered subjectivity passively subjected to heteronomous agency.
This panel welcomes abstracts on visual freedoms, which take new looks at
Romantic visual attractions, spectacles, forms, genres, media, skills,
practices. Topics might include visuality and materiality; visual culture,
associationism and aesthetic freedoms; visual technologies and machinic
vision; visual artefacts and displays in museums and galleries; new ways of
viewing and reading.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Dr Luisa Calè at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
Waves of Revolution, Echoes of Revolution. A Special Session sponsored by
the European Romantic Review.
Session Convenor: Frederick Burwick (Professor, UCLA)
Rather than appraising the impact of the French Revolution on the literature
of the period as a single event with only specific nationalist respose, this
special session intends to examine the literary response to the subsequent
waves of revolution and reform throughout Europe during the sixty years
following the storming of the Bastille: the Bloody Reign of Terror, the
fall of Robespierre, the rise of Napoleon, the Rebellion in Madrid, the War
of 1912, the Bourbon restoration, the German
Constitutions, the Greek-Turk War, the Independence of Poland, and the
revolutionary efforts of 1848/49. Of particular interest is the ways in
which later spokespersons for reform echo the earlier ones: Marx cites
Hegel, Engel cites Coleridge, Dohm cites Wollstonecraft (or on the other
side of the political ledger: Metternich cites Burke).
This panel invites abstracts for papers from scholars of American, British,
and Continental Romanticism. International and comparative proposals are
especially welcome. The deadline for proposals to special sessions is Nov.
17, 2006.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Frederick Burwick at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
How to submit your proposal
For information on how to submit your proposal including access to online
submission please visit the conference website at:
https://www.bris.ac.uk/romanticstudies/events/2007callforpapers.html
All those attending the conference must be members of either BARS (The
British Association of Romantic Studies) or NASSR (North American Society
for the Study of Romanticism).
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