Romanticists!

[Ozymandias Melancholia]

Following the trend of threads dedicated to discussing shared areas of interest, I thought Romanticism deserved some representation! 

Discuss your interest/focus within this period, certain writers, theoretical trends, favorite scholars, anything!

My current research interests involve the intersection of Romantic culture and the history of science, alongside recent theories of affect and philosophy of emotions. 

 

[shortstack51]

Represent! I see we've both been wait listed at CUNY as well. Congrats on your Brown acceptance!

 

Your research really interests me--I took a course called "Neuro-Literature" last semester, which involved a lot of the history of neuroscience and the science of the brain. We read some historical scientific texts alongside Romanticists (well, it was also from the Renaissance forward).

 

I'm a Romanticist, but I'm also into poetics in general. My research generally focuses on the relationship between subject/object, how their roles/voices get complicated and conflated, and how this complexity affects what work the poem is doing. My writing sample uses Derrida to compare Wordsworth and Stevens, and I am currently working on what will hopefully be a journal article about a Renaissance poet (Katherine Philips) using Queer Theorists' perspectives on subject and object. My ultimate tool is close-reading, which is the best thing about reading poetry for me--so much opportunity to close-read! I actually haven't encountered a lot of secondary criticism outside of professors I've worked with thanks to a limited number of Romanticists in my current department. I'm excited because I've been accepted at UCONN, and I'm currently discussing how well my work fits with their faculty and resources with a professor there. We'll see what my work evolves into as I move forward.

 

I took a course titled Keats & Company that discussed the sociability of Romantic poets. In that class, we discussed how the sort of "new frontier" in Romantic poetry is moving beyond "traditional" theory (the importance of imagination, emotion recollected in tranquility, etc) and towards new social and theoretical ventures. It seems both of us represent this trend.

[Ozymandias Melancholia]

Represent! I see we've both been wait listed at CUNY as well. Congrats on your Brown acceptance!

 

Your research really interests me--I took a course called "Neuro-Literature" last semester, which involved a lot of the history of neuroscience and the science of the brain. We read some historical scientific texts alongside Romanticists (well, it was also from the Renaissance forward).

 

I'm a Romanticist, but I'm also into poetics in general. My research generally focuses on the relationship between subject/object, how their roles/voices get complicated and conflated, and how this complexity affects what work the poem is doing. My writing sample uses Derrida to compare Wordsworth and Stevens, and I am currently working on what will hopefully be a journal article about a Renaissance poet (Katherine Philips) using Queer Theorists' perspectives on subject and object. My ultimate tool is close-reading, which is the best thing about reading poetry for me--so much opportunity to close-read! I actually haven't encountered a lot of secondary criticism outside of professors I've worked with thanks to a limited number of Romanticists in my current department. I'm excited because I've been accepted at UCONN, and I'm currently discussing how well my work fits with their faculty and resources with a professor there. We'll see what my work evolves into as I move forward.

 

I took a course titled Keats & Company that discussed the sociability of Romantic poets. In that class, we discussed how the sort of "new frontier" in Romantic poetry is moving beyond "traditional" theory (the importance of imagination, emotion recollected in tranquility, etc) and towards new social and theoretical ventures. It seems both of us represent this trend.

Your research interests sound equally fascinating! The topic of your writing sample actually reminds me of a paper I wrote about the destabilization of identity and personality as precipitated by disparate, contradicting "voices" within the works of Byron and Wordsworth. While I didn't necessary incorporate Derrida into my discussion, but rather Bakhtin, I was certainly looking (and thinking) in the direction of deconstruction. 

My writing sample considered the indeterminate status of selfhood in Keats's poetry and letters, and how this complicates affect's transportation or the body's capacity to register an emotional experience. I also investigated Keats's anatomical and surgical training at Guy's Hospital, with a special emphasis on the space of the anatomy theater as an instantiation of the internal, presence/absence divide.

It does seem we both represent this trend. What I find especially invigorating about current Romantic scholarship is how we don't necessarily dismiss nor ignore these "traditional theories," but rather re-contextualize them and re-interpret them based on these new theoretical avenues. For instance, Romanticists with a science bent are re-considering how the imagination was empirically understood within the various scientific disciplines in the 19th century to develop a more nuanced understanding of this mental capacity.

 

[shortstack51]

Yes, exactly. I still find quite a bit of inspiration in the Romantics' depiction and description of the imagination, but it's I find it really enjoyable to explore other ways of examining their poetry. It's also interesting to note the close link between deconstruction and Romanticism--notable deconstructionists (such as Barbara Johnson) spent a good deal of time writing about Romantic poetry. It would be interesting to explore what precisely about Romantic poetry lends itself to such deconstructionist critiques (although I suppose there may be nothing "precise" about it). For myself, I enjoy looking at how nature as "object" is conflated with the subject. Deconstruction certainly provides a good starting point, though of late, I am moving into Queer Theory (which, of course, is itself pretty much borne of deconstruction).

 

I also wrote about indeterminate selfhood in Keats' letters (with an emphasis on the poetry in his letters), though that paper examined how the natural description of his location changed his subjectivity. The letters and other "supplemental" primary texts are a whole other avenue opening up in Romantic criticism. When you wrote about the transportation of affect and the ability/capacity of the body to register emotional experience, did you do so with anatomical specificity? IE, did you write about how the anatomy was understood in the 19th century and what parts of the anatomy were affected? Like I said, since I just came out of a course tangentially related, I'm quite interested!

 

If I may ask, where did you do/are you doing your BA? I did my BA at a very small catholic school with a somewhat limited English department (we had one Romanticist who never taught a course while I was there and only one person who really did theory in-depth), so I've had to play "catch up" during my tenure as an MA--I had never even heard of Bakhtin before coming here. I'm looking forward to being able to delve into the field and into theory on a much deeper level in my PhD program.

Edited February 25, 2014 by shortstack51