ROMANTICISM TODAY

Gesellschaft für englische Romantik e.V. (German Society for English Romanticism)

12th International Symposium:

University of Tübingen , October 4 – 7, 2007

The persistence of Romanticism in modern culture has been widely discussed in recent years. Romantic afterlives have been traced in literary criticism and theory, in poetry and fiction from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in theatre and film, in popular culture, in politics and the sciences, and, more generally, on a fundamental cultural level revolving around questions of identity, authority and authorship in a modern or even ‘postmodern’ sense. Against this background, the 2007 conference of the German Society for English Romanticism will meet the challenge of addressing the contemporaneity of Romanticism by presenting current readings of Romantic texts, reflecting upon present institutional and private contexts, and Romantic readings of current texts, reflecting upon historical continuities and differences, as well as, more generally, contributions on recent developments in expanding and preserving the record of Romanticism, the afterlives of Romantic works and artists in various media and institutions, the role of Romantic icons, works and strategies in cultural memory, the state of Romantic studies today, Romanticism and recent theory (ecocriticism, the cognitive turn, ...), Romanticism as a key to historicizing the aesthetic, and finally Romantic features of contemporary cultural practices in all kinds of spheres, including politics (Is there a post-colonial Romanticism? A post-national Romanticism? ...) (and popular culture (How is authenticity fabricated? What kind of authority is evoked by stardom?)

We hope to welcome you to a stimulating and thought-provoking academic and an enchanting social programme in one of Germany’s (or even the world’s) most Romantic locations situated, as a recently coined slogan has it, between High tech and Hegel (and Hölderlin, for that matter).

Local organizer:

Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinfandt
Englisches Seminar
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Wilhelmstr. 50 D-72074 Tübingen, Germany
christoph.reinfandt@uni-tuebingen.de

Programme

Thursday, Oct. 4 (Hölderlinturm)

Reception Desk/Conference Office open at 'Hölderlinturm'

Conference Opening

David Constantine, Oxford
Reading and Lecture

Plenary Lecture
David Simpson, University of California , Davis
"At Home With Homelessness: Wordsworth after 1989"

Conference Warming (Kelter, Schmiedtorstr. 17)

Friday, Oct. 5 (Fürstenzimmer, Schloss Hohentübingen)

Plenary Lecture:
Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews
"Romantic Nows: Leigh Hunt, Romantic Biography and the New Historicism"

Papers:
Fred Burwick, University of California , Los Angeles
"Cognitive Romanticism"

Rosa Karl, University of Munich
"Mining the Mind’s Cave: The Brain as Emancipative Power Plant in Shelley’s Laon and Cythna"

Papers:

RALF HAEKEL, HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY, BERLIN
"'Talking of Mind but Thinking of Brick and Mortar': Romantic Reactions against Materialism and Their Relevance Today"

Anthony John Harding, University of Saskatchewan
"'Ethics of Reading ' in Romantic and Post-Structuralist Theory: A Conflicted Romantic Heritage?"

Book Launch/Lunch:

CHRISTOPH BODE, UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH (LMU) introduces
Fred Burwick, James McKusick, Faustus: From the German of Goethe Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007)
followed by

Papers:

Stefanie Fricke, University of Munich
"Constructing Jane Austen – Recent Representations of Jane Austen in Popular Culture"

Frank Erik Pointner, University Duisburg-Essen
"Cartooning Coleridge: Narrative Strategies and Their Functions in Hunt Emerson's Comic Adaption of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Angela Esterhammer, University of ZÜrich
"The Enigmas of Andrew of Padua (1820): Romantic or Postmodern, Forgery or Pedagogy?"

Sebastian Domsch, University of Munich
"The Legacy of what if: Welsh Indians, British Pantisocrats, and an Irish Poet"

Plenary

Timothy Fulford, Nottingham Trent University
"The Romantic Legacy in Current Popular Media Images of American Indians"

Saturday, Oct. 6 (Fürstenzimmer, Schloss Hohentübingen)

Plenary

Tilottama Rajan, University of Western Ontario
"The Abyss of the Past: Schelling's Ages of the World"

Papers:

Martin ProchÁzka, Charles University Prague
"From the Growth of the Poet's Mind to the Genealogy of Imagination: Aesthetic and Ethical Implications of The Prelude"

Hans -Ulrich Mohr, University of Dresden
"'The Sublime is Now': The Postmodern Sublime and Its Romantic Inheritance"

Gerold Sedlmayr, University of Passau
" Albion 's Self as Albion 's Other: Reading Blake through Ricoeur"

Roger Lüdeke, University of Munich
"Cut-up? Playback. The Politics of Prophecy in William S. Burroughs and William Blake"

Monika Seidl, University of Vienna
"Cutting Edge Romanticism"

Martin Butler, University Duisburg-Essen
"On Delusional Disorders and Schizophrenic Selves: Renegotiating the Poetics and Politics of the Romantic Imagination in Jeremy Leven’s Film Don Juan de Marco”

Katharina Rennhak, University Munich
"Reflections on Some of Jim Jarmusch's Men (Dead or Alive); or
On the Longevity of the Romantic Subject"

Evy Varsamopoulou, University of Cyprus
"Dying for Art: the Romantic Longing for Transcendence in Krystof Kieslowski’s La Double Vie de Véronique"

Plenary

Keir Keightley, University of Western Ontario
"Singing, Suffering, Succeeding: Marketing Romantic Authenticity in Popular Music from Sinatra to Eminem"

Sunday, Oct. 7 (Fürstenzimmer, Schloss Hohentübingen)

Plenary

Paul Fry, Yale University
"Romanticism as Theory"

Papers:

Mirka Modrzewska, University of Gdansk
"The Romantic Myth of Slavdom and Its Current Recreation"

Mihaela Irimia, University of Bucharest
"Some Avatars of Revolutionary Romanticism: A Late Modern View of Romanian National History"

Kai Merten, University of Kiel
"Two Men Contemplating the Moon: Romantic Theatricality after Waiting for Godot"

Christoph Ehland, University of Würzburg
"Dead Poets’ Society: The Picture of the Romantic Artist as a Dead Man"

General Meeting of the GER Members

Punting on the Neckar

Farewell Dinner (Casino am Neckar, Wöhrdstr. 25)