Sites of Openness: Between Living and Nonliving in Romantic Literature and Science
Noah Heringman (Missouri) and Richard Sha (American)

   While recent biopolitical readings of Romanticism have opened new possibilities for the genealogy of sovereignty in the political realm, another strand of recent criticism concerned with literature and science has brought the category of bios itself into focus as an area of uncertainty during the Romantic period. As poets, philosophers, and naturalists scrutinized the boundary between living and nonliving things, it became fluid, a zone of indistinction and a site of openness. Physiologists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and John Hunter traced the principle of life downward to ever simpler forms, verging on the inorganic, while naturalists including Buffon and von Humboldt either traced the history of life back into the fossil record, or argued for a continuum between organic and inorganic matter.  Once thought clearly part of physics, electricity became animated and the vital engine of the nervous system, but Volta fought to make sure that Galvani’s animal electricity was understood as having really been caused by contact between different metals.  And Blake, in dialogue with Hunter and Erasmus Darwin among others, collapsed the natural categories of mineral and vegetable, unfolding the anatomy of “metal, rock & stone in ever-painful throes of vegetation.” Darwin declared that the ultimate purpose of living bodies was to form land masses: “one of the uses or final causes of the organized world, not indeed very flattering to our vanity, [is] that it converts water into earth, forming islands and continents by its recrements or exuviae.”  In this special session, papers will explore the possibilities opened by construing Romantic life, following recent historians of science, as an area of uncertainty and porousness, and consider the implications of this uncertainty. 
   Please send abstracts to both Noah Heringman  <[email protected]> and Richard C. Sha <[email protected]> by a deadline of December 15.


"Unformalism"
Devin M. Garofalo (Florida Atlantic University) and Devin Griffiths (University of Southern California)

   From Coleridge’s “caverns measureless” to Shelley’s “pil’d” and “primeval” floes of ice, from Blake’s “want of … bounding form” to the “chaotic universality” of Schlegel’s fragments, Romanticism is preoccupied with forms verging on formlessness. Even as the Romantics theorized organicist models of form that privileged totality, unity and harmony, they tested forms that were interstitial, fissured, and open in contour. This panel explores the tensions and collusions between form and formlessness, and the crisis such collusions induce for thinking about the patterns of literature.
   We are especially eager to consider the following questions: How do Romanticism’s open forms and fragmentary poetics call into question or model alternatives to the notion of form as rigid and inflexible—as an agent of containment and control? What is Romantic formlessness? What is its politics? Can forms, for instance, not only capture the self-contained and the (pre)determined, but also open up to the intermediary and the transitory? Are form and unform processes or states, things or actions? What is the relation between formalization and deformation? How might literature precede formalization or escape it altogether? If Romantic form is aligned to organicism and vitality, what is the relation between the unformed and the inorganic and lifeless? If formlessness is an iteration or type or instantiation of form (rather than its antithesis), what is not form in the Romantic period? If formlessness is form, where does form begin and end? Do open or intermediary forms possess particular affordances? What are their pitfalls and liabilities? Finally, do these forms ask us to read differently? What un-formalisms might Romantic formlessness produce?
   We invite proposals for 15-minute papers that take up (but are not limited to) the above provocations and questions. Submit proposals for consideration by 8 December 2017 via email to Devin M. Garofalo, Florida Atlantic University ([email protected]), and Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California ([email protected]). Presenters will be notified of acceptance no later than January 1.


Romantic Openings in 1818
European Romantic Review Sponsored Panel, Lucy Morrison (Nebraska-Omaha)

   What texts opened new directions for Romanticism in 1818? Recognizing the rich bicentennial possibilities of 1818 in 2018, ERR calls for proposals for a special session about openings that the texts of 1818 created. From Frankenstein’s science fiction launch to the conclusion of Childe Harold, with Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, Keats’s sonnets, and so many other texts, the possibilities for new directions in Romanticism pivot during the Regency era, as scholars have long recognized a shift from “early” to “late” Romanticism. Indeed, the world itself shifted, as the British Admiralty organized the first Arctic exploration. This session calls for proposals addressing how texts issued in 1818 opened or shifted future directions in Romantic literature. All textual addresses are welcome, and papers should root themselves in the bicentenary while opening doors to new directions in their address of how such texts suggested future opportunities. 300 word abstracts are welcomed by Lucy Morrison at [email protected] by 15 December; panelists will be notified of the status of their abstract by January 1, 2018.


Romantic Periodicals as Cultural Mediators
Tom Toremans (Leuven)

   During the last decade, the study of Romantic periodicals has produced a number of groundbreaking studies that have focused on a wide range of aspects, such as the politics of periodical publication (Parker), its place in the broader literary culture of the Romantic period (Christie), the impact of the periodical press on genre and literary identity (Schoenfield) or on gender, politics and nationalism (Cronin), the entanglement of periodical publication and empire (Fang), the metropolitan context and readership of the periodical press (Stewart), the relation between literary and periodical writing (Wheatley), and performative self-authorisation (Mole). This panel aims to contribute to this thriving field of Romantic periodical studies by focusing on their role as cultural mediators.
   As Peter France noted in 2009 (“Looking Abroad”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.1), the presence of translation in Romantic periodicals is a field that has “yet to be fully explored”. France’s argument is based on the observation that “the nineteenth century was a time when British culture, although increasingly insular in many ways, was also increasingly aware of a wide spread of world literature” and that an “important part in this exploration was played by the thriving new periodical literature”. By extension, also the broader process of cultural mediation is in need of more systematic study: how and to what extent did Romantic periodicals engage with non-British cultures and introduce them to their readership? What was the broader impact of this cultural mediation? What role did Romantic periodicals play in the reception of foreign literatures in Britain? Which agents played a central role in these processes of mediation and reception? Do we discern different patterns in different periodicals? How do specific cases contribute to a broader understanding of this transcultural dimension of Romantic periodicals?
   This panel invites papers that address cultural mediation and reception in Romantic periodicals in a wide variety of forms, ranging from translation to reviewing, travel accounts, essays on foreign cultures, etc. Papers can focus on literary topics, but might also address medicine, history, political theory, and other disciplinary fields. Both papers on the mediation of dominant (French and German) and less dominant languages and cultures are welcome.
   Please submit proposals for 20-minute papers by 20 December 2017 via email to Tom Toremans ([email protected]). Presenters will be notified of acceptance no later than January 10.


Practically Romantic: Pedagogic Genres and Cultural Practices
Brianna Beehler (USC) and Gerald Maa (UCI)

   There is still much to learn out of Raymond Williams' landmark study Culture and Society sixty years after its publication, and recent advancements in our understanding of genre can be especially illuminating.  If literature has been charged with the task to delight and instruct at least since the Poetics, literature in the age of culture does not instruct merely through Aristotelian mimicry.  Rather, as Williams has proven, since culture emerged as a sociological concept at the turn into the nineteenth century, literature has taught by instantiating and transmitting cultural practices integral to the reproduction of culture.  This means that genre, what Virginia Jackson has defined as "any mode of recognition between any two people," has become the concept central to cultural education after the emergence of culture as we know it today, which is to say, from the Romantic era on.
   We are looking for talks about Romantic works written in pedagogic genres, like manifestos, passion plays, grammar books, conduct manuals, Georgics, and the Bildungsroman.  We are also looking for Romantic works that experiment with their genres for pedagogic ends, like, arguably, Frankenstein, The Prelude, Illustrations of Political Economy, or "Ode on a Grecian Urn."  What we want are papers that explore what Romantic texts of pedagogic genres can teach us about the cultural practices that emerged within or as educational practices during the first half of the nineteenth century.
   Please send abstracts to both Brianna Beehler ([email protected]) and Gerald Maa ([email protected]) by 3 January.  Presenters will be notified no later than 10 January.


Romantic Hospitality / Impossible Communities
Kir Kuiken (SUNY-Albany) and Adam R. Rosenthal (Texas A&M University)
   The question of hospitality, or of the openness to the other, always runs up against its limit: the host, be it an individual, a city, a university, or a nation, must decide: Do I open myself absolutely, and in so doing, risk becoming a guest in my own home? Or, do I restrict my exposure, limit the extent to which I welcome, and in so doing risk denying the call of the other? Absolute hospitality (or absolute openness), in short, always risks eliminating the “host” and thus ceasing to be “hospitable,” while restricted or calculated hospitality (closure), risks not being hospitable enough. If community is understood as the locus of “the common,” of that which is shared, or as that space within which decisions about openness and closedness may take place, then we might say that “community” is always constituted as, or in the wake of, a decision on absolute hospitality.
   This panel will explore how Romantic authors variously confront, accept, or reject this aporia. It asks, above all, how Romantic authors may have theorized, inscribed, or imagined “impossible communities” that escape the opposition of the open/closed, or the paradigm of the “border” as it is put forth by traditional political theory. Is there a thought of unrestricted or absolute community in Romanticism? Could such a community be properly “constituted,” or would it necessarily always be still to come? What might the Romantics have to offer to contemporary attempts to reconceive community and/or hospitality, for example in the work of Derrida, Blanchot, Bataille, Esposito, etc.?
   We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that take up (but are not limited to) the above questions. Submit proposals for consideration by 20 December 2017 via email to Adam R. Rosenthal ([email protected]) and Kir Kuiken ([email protected]). Presenters will be notified of acceptance no later than January 1.


Openness, Open-Mindedness
Caroline Winter (University of Victoria)

   The Big 5 (or 6), the mirror and the lamp, and the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”: these ideas have traditionally defined Romanticism, and to a great extent continue to do so. But by holding on to these familiar ideas, are we moving away from the openness so characteristic of Romantic thought? Are we closing our minds to new ways of knowing, feeling, and seeing? This three- or four-paper panel explores the idea of open-mindedness through papers that approach Romantic texts (literary and otherwise) from new perspectives. What happens if we approach the Romantic texts that we study with an open mind? What is at stake if we do not?
   Submissions are welcome along the following lines, but the panel is open to all possibilities. Non-traditional formats are particularly welcome.

• Digital explorations of Romantic texts
• Challenges to accepted readings or interpretations
• Reading familiar texts in unfamiliar ways
• Opening up the definition of Romanticism
• Re-evaluating the canon
• Romanticism in the “real world”
• Discovering and uncovering lost and hidden texts and creators
• Decolonizing Romanticism
• Opening up new ways of reading, feeling, thinking, learning, seeing, and knowing

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to [email protected] by Wednesday, January 3, 2018.


Prose | Form | Romanticism
Daniel Stout (University of Mississippi)

   This panel will reconsider the idea of prose in the Romantic period. It’s animated by the sense that, as scholars of romanticism, we are often tempted to treat prose as the shapeless antithesis to poetry’s meaningful structures, a kind of background against which the real work of romanticism (i.e. poetry) emerges. At the same time, however, prose not only remained a vivid presence in romantic poetics (e.g. Wordsworth’s claim for the proximity between poetry and prose “well written”) but prosaicness itself (the rhythms of everyday speech, merely local reference, the nonteleological structures of quotidian conversation) crucially enabled new aesthetic possibilities even for poets (like, say, Coleridge) who seem otherwise committed to transcendent, singularizing significance. There are, undoubtedly, many ways to think this question. But given romantic scholarship’s recent interest in materialist philosophy—which tends to emphasize unfolding, processual ontologies—and the politics of the everyday—which tends to emphasize open-ended, present-tense, or (in William Galperin’s term) “possibilistic” modes—it seems especially important to rethink the role of prose and the prosaic in romantic aesthetics.

Possible topics could include:

• ontology of/and prose (e.g. materialism)
• politics of/and prose (e.g. democracy)
• prose and historicity
• prose and ongoing-ness
• prose and the fragment
• the poetics of/and prose
• the prosiness (or prosaicism?) of poems
• prose and the lyric
• romanticism and the essay form
• romanticism and periodical prose
• romanticism and free indirect style
• prose and criticism
• prose and theory

Please send 300-word abstracts to [email protected] by Monday, January 8th.


Masters and Multitudes: Mis/Information and the Romantic Mass Movement
Jamison Kantor (OSU) and Stephen Pallas (SUNY Stony Brook)

   In her 1899 biography of the radical publisher Richard Carlile, Theophila Carlile avers that her father had little defense “to escape the vulture-fangs of the law” during his 1819 trial for seditious libel and blasphemy. The trial resulted from Carlile’s publication of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, a text that problematizes, among other things, the sources and dissemination of knowledge and the relationship between the “liberation” of modern information and the control of the sovereign. Ultimately sentenced to three years in prison—and prohibited from communicating with his family and associates during this time—Carlile’s conviction marks an important historical moment at the intersection of politics, epistemology, and open public discourse.
   Framed by our own hyperactive media environment, the rise of fake news, and the epistemological split between different political parties, this panel seeks submissions that address the connection between Romantic politics, culture, and the spread of information. To illuminate this connection, we invite papers from a variety of different methodologies and interests: media studies, political theory, digital humanities (and its prehistory), the culture and dissemination of print, and more. Such approaches could evoke an array of questions, such as:

• How did the breakdown of traditional barriers of communication influence the Revolution controversy, pamphleteering, and the culture of (mis)information in the 1790s? How did the publication of radical thought constitute, as Adorno says, a “resistance to that which is forced upon it?”
• How is the lyric an escape from an “open” media ecology featuring too much information—or a reaction to the sublime proliferation of novels and other popular literature? Does Romantic poetry act instead as a style of public information that can inspire radical change?
• Does Romantic literature and culture validate Habermas’s idea of a political modernity built upon shared principles of communication? Does it offer a strong critique of Habermas and communicative action?
• How is the 18 th -19 th century archive a response to a schizophrenic media environment where truth comes to be seen as contingent? How do such archives nuance Foucault’s claims about the creation of a “true” political history?

   Please submit paper proposals to Jamison Kantor ([email protected]) and Stephen Pallas ([email protected]) by January 10. Ultimately, we hope that this panel inspires discussion on the legacy of Romantic mass communication within the current political climate.


The British Romantic Poets in Translation
Olivia Loksing Moy (CUNY, Lehman)

   This panel invites explorations of how the major British Romantic poets have been translated and received in other languages and national traditions. What can be said about the reception of landmark poems after they are imported into new national traditions? Which authoritative translations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, or Byron in certain countries have been most successful over time, and why? Why do certain national audiences gravitate towards individual poets and not others? (Which poets “translate better” into certain languages?)
   We invite comparative studies that focus on variants among different translations and explorations of how the syntax, rhyme and meter of famous lines are immortalized in other languages. What problems arise in the translation of specific verse forms or subject matter? What translations exist, for example, of epic or mock epic (The Prelude and Don Juan), or how do the most famous lines by Shelley appear around the world in other tongues? How does the “universality” of the Romantic poets falter or flourish in non-European contexts? We are also interested in ways in which certain British and Anglophone classics have become incorporated into transnational canons or syllabi for literary study. 
   This panel particularly encourages scholars to engage in multilingual and comparative analysis, and welcomes translators as well as literary scholars.
If interested, please contact: 
Olivia Loksing Moy, City University of New York (Lehman)
[email protected]


Gothic Austen:  Within and Beyond Northanger Abbey
Irene Fizer (Hofstra University)

   In 1816, thirteen years after Northanger Abbey was accepted by a London publisher, slated for “immediate publication,” and then unceremoniously shelved, without explanation, Jane Austen appended a brief prefatory note to her manuscript.  “That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think it worth while to publish seems extraordinary,” she writes.  With consummate dispassion, Austen retrospectively gothicizes her aborted authorial debut—turning the ''bookseller" into an unnamed figure of irrational malevolence.  A cruel tempter, who suffered her to give up her first completed novel, he then doomed her to silence, by refusing to say why her words would never see the light of day.  Although Austen anticipated that Northanger Abbey would soon come into print in 1816, her preface also carries a touch of the uncanny, as the declared return of the repressed, resurrecting the manifesto of a young woman writer.
   Moreover, this preface, no matter how brief, bears witness to the fact that Austen herself never fully repressed the gothic novel, and that the formative influence of this populist eighteenth-century genre continued to leave traces on her imagination, and on her subsequent work.  In turn, the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey, to be marked in 2018, will color this, the 200th anniversary of the novel's publication, with a suitably gothic melancholy.  
   With this in mind, I invite submissions for this NASSR panel on a wide range of possible themes, inclusive of, but not limited to:  manifestations of the gothic in Austen’s work other than Northanger Abbey; critical readings of the gothic novels referenced in Emma;  “gothicized” readings of Austen’s works other than Northanger Abbey; new critical approaches to Northanger Abbey itself; straight-faced and parodic homages to Northanger Abbey, in print and online; cinematic adaptations of Northanger Abbey; and innovative re-assessments of Austen’s reading practices, prior to and/or after her composition of Northanger Abbey, with particular attention to the gothic.  
   Send detailed abstracts to: Dr. Irene Fizer, Associate Professor, Department of English, Hofstra University:  [email protected].