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Colin Jager, "Introduction."
In this introduction to the volume, Jager
argues that secularism has remained an obscure topic within
romantic studies. Noting that "a genealogy of romantic
secularism has yet to be written," Jager sketches some
aspects of such a genealogy by noting the persistence of
romantic thinking—about the symbol, for
example—in secular thinking. Cosmopolitanism, he
notes, has been more widely considered alongside
romanticism, but here again the relationship of secularism
to "romantic cosmopolitanism" has tended to remain
invisible. Is cosmopolitanism part of a secular project? Or
do the conditions of postmodernity in fact make possible a
religious cosmopolitanism of a kind anticipated by some
romantic texts?
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Colin
Jager, "Byron and Romantic Occidentalism."
Engaging with Akeel Bilgrami's recent
rehabilitation of "enchantment," Jager argues for the
critical power of Byronic enchantment. Bilgrami links such
critical power to what he calls "occidentalism," namely a
critique of the west. Jager argues that the critical reach
of Byron's occidentalism actually goes beyond Bilgrami's,
for it allows the reader to glimpse the costs of
enchantment.
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Mark
Canuel, "Romantic Fear."
This essay claims that Romantic
secularization was an institutional rather than a mental
phenomenon. While informed by arguments and debates that
emerged throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
Romantic arguments articulated the secular as a product of
institutional toleration: not a change in beliefs but
rather a new organization of beliefs. The essay argues
still further that this new organization required a
reorganization of the deployment of fear among political
subjects. In contrast to political models in Hobbes and
Hegel, which either accentuated or eliminated fear as
inimical to the project of political organization, Romantic
writers as diverse as Bentham and Coleridge propose an
absorption and reorientation of fear within the confines of
inclusive institutions. Fear becomes the formal complement
of an institutional systematization and identification of
crimes and avoidable penal sanctions, the constructed
affective complement of systematized penality.
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Paul Hamilton, "Post-Secular
Conviviality."
The equation of secularization with
demystification no longer seems to work. Baldly stated, the
problem is this: the cultural insult in the assumption that
one culture can enlighten another overrides the idea that
enlightenment is a benefit blind to cultural difference.
This article addresses historical questions such as the
following: Did Romanticism recover its Enlightenment
sources in ways that actually resisted the contemporary
colonial thinking into which it was dissolving? If it did,
then could it be re-read so as to address the question of
how to differ from someone in a non-coercive form of
communication, instead of communicating so as coercively to
efface difference? Does cosmopolitanism have to involve the
colonialism of one belief-system by another? To what extent
did Romanticism really engage with these paradoxes in a
currently helpful manner?
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Bruce
Robbins, "Afterword: Secularism, Cosmopolitanism, and
Romanticism."
Bruce Robbins notes in his response to the
three essays that cosmopolitanism remains for the most part
a background figure against which secularism and
romanticism are variously positioned. He counts the essays
in the volume as examples of the secularizing of the
secular, a position which acknowledges that secularism is
newly interesting to scholars not as a term of appreciation
but as an object of contestation for its tendency to look
like a continuation of religion by other means.
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