Romantic Circles Blog

Second Thelwall Memorial Conference

October 16-18, 2009 Dalhousie University Halifax, Canada

The Art and the Act: John Thelwall in Practice

Since the inaugural Thelwall memorial conference held in Bath in January 2007, interdisiciplinary scholarship on Thelwall’s multifaceted career has gathered momentum. In 2009, the 175th anniversary of his death, we will once again gather to take stock, to celebrate his remarkable legacy, and to extend the circle of those who have risen to the challenge that his theory and practice offer our research, our teaching and our lives.

Elocution is the Art, or the Act of so delivering our own thoughts and sentiments, or the thoughts and sentiments of others, as not only to convey to those around us … the full purport and meaning of the words and sentences in which those thoughts are cloathed; but, also, to excite and impress upon their minds—the feelings, the imagination and the passions by which those thoughts are dictated, or with which they should naturally be accompanied.

(Thelwall, Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science)

This conference invites papers on any aspect of Thelwall’s wide-ranging arts and acts (medical, political, elocutionary, literary, journalistic, peripatetic etc). Since Thelwall challenges us to practise what we profess, papers that cross boundaries between theory and practice are particularly welcome, as are those that explore Thelwall’s legacy, and/or transatlantic connections.

Halifax is ideally located between British and American Thelwall communities, with direct international connections. Birthplace of representative government and freedom of the press in Canada, this colourful 18th century port hosts several universities and a dynamic arts scene. In conjunction with the conference, Dalhousie Theatre Productions will stage a full-scale performance of one of Thelwall’s plays.
Papers and panel proposals by February 17, 2009 to judith.thompson@dal.ca

Judith Thompson
Department of English, Dalhousie University
6135 University Ave. Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4P9

New audio files are available at Romantic Circles’ Poets on Poets series: Andrew Kozma reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Part IV; Jennifer Kwon Dobbs reading Charlotte Turner Smiths’s “Sonnet LXX” and ”Sonnet LXXVII” [from Elegiac Sonnets]; Elizabeth Volpe reading William Blake’s “The Human Abstract”; and Anne Shaw reading Blake’s “The Tyger.” As always, you can play or download the MP3 files directly from the Poets on Poets page–

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/poets/toc.html

–or subscribe to the podcasts via iTunes (search for “Romantic Circles”) or directly from our page.

The Poets on Poets series is edited and produced by Tilar Mazzeo with the assistance of Doug Guerra and Matt O’Donnell.

Romanticism at Western

The University of Western Ontario: London, Ontario

25-26 April 2009

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ross Woodman (UWO Emeritus)

Recent work in Romanticism encourages us to consider the myriad manifestations and roles of affective experience in Romantic theory and criticism. In Romantic Moods, for example, Thomas Pfau locates within the folds and crosscurrents of European Romanticism “a persistent and unsettling ‘feeling’ of the irreducible tenuousness and volatility of being.” The wide-ranging implications of such an innovative re-imagination of Romantic affect may be felt in the various conscious and unconscious resistances to an Enlightenment faith in the unity of experience, a progressive concept of history, and the transparency of the public sphere, resistances that perhaps come to light in Keats’ yearning, “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”

As a focus for its third annual conference, the Romantic Reading Group at UWO encourages enquiry into Romantic affect, mood, and feeling. The historical timeframe suggested by the conference title aims to impose some restriction on a potentially expansive thematic: 1748 reflects the publication of Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and 1819 marks a watershed year in Romanticism—a year witnessing the publication of major works by Percy Shelley (The Cenci), the first two Cantos of Byron’s Don Juan, three novels by Scott, Coleridge’s public lectures at the Crown and Anchor, and much of Keats’ most well known poetry. Far less triumphantly, however, it is also the year of the Peterloo massacre.

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

● the nature of Romantic feeling ● the revolutionary potential of feeling ● feeling and the formation of the subject ● Romantic moods (anxiety, trauma, melancholy, boredom, paranoia) ● the socio-economics of feeling ● the historicity of sentiment ● the pathology of feeling ● symptomatic appearance of emotion ● sentimentality, sensibility, and genre ● the Gothic ● affect and embodiment ● Romantic sympathy and community ● the rhetoric of emotion ● the poetics and dramatics of passion ● affect and empiricism ● Romantic feeling and the transcendental ● the boundaries between the understanding, feeling, and judgment ● the ethics of affect ● negotiating sincerity ● confessional narratives ● moral sentiment, education, and virtue ● affect, feeling, and the Scottish Enlightenment ● excitability, irritability, and contagion ● metropolitan moods ● the psychosomatics of passion ● political feeling

We invite abstracts of 250 words that explore the ideas and implications (political, historical, literary, philosophical, aesthetic, economic, medical, scientific, and so forth) of Romantic affect, mood, and feeling.

Deadline for Abstracts: 1 March 2009

Please send abstracts to: westernromantics@gmail.com