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7A. New Boots, New Bodies
Marc Redfield (Claremont Graduate): "Harold Bloom's
Body"
James Allard (Waterloo): "'Mortal,
Immortal': Embodying Keats"
Paul Youngquist (Penn State):
"Byron's New Boot: Poetry, Politics and the Prosthetic Body"
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"Mortal, Immortal': Embodying
Keats"
James Allard
University of Waterloo
This paper seeks to begin to articulate what I call (after
Steven Bruhm's "Gothic Body") the "Romantic Body": a "new" body
that becomes the site of a peculiarly Romantic struggle between a
finite corporeality, as discussed in medical discourse of the
period, and an infinite imagination, as discussed by may of the
poets of the period--in this case, Keats. After a brief
discussion of the various types of discourses Keats employed to
detail his conception of "body," I offer a reading of Keats's
long poem Endymion, focusing on the pervasive but
problematic representations of Endymion's body (or bodies) in and
around the text.
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"Byron's New Boot:
Poetry, Politics and the Prosthetic Body"
Paul Youngquist
Penn State
. . . what if what is proper to humankind were to be
inhabited by the inhuman?
--Lyotard
Byron is, in Lyotard's sense, an artist of the inhuman.
His poetry confronts an otherness that inhabits the human
body--or better, the otherness of the body to its social
evaluations. Byron's politics arise in large part from his
allegiance to this difference, and I will argue that they have
their beginnings in his boots. Byron was born with a club foot--a
fact usually dismissed as little more than an occasion for
overcoming adversity. But it put him in close proximity to both
the body's materiality and its social appropriations. In 1799,
upon returning to London for the first time since birth, the
young Byron had his foot examined by a who's who of modern
medicine: John Hunter, author of Observations on Certain Parts of
the Animal Oeconomy (1786), Matthew Baillie, author of The Morbid
Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body
(1797), and Thomas Sheldrake, author of A Practical Essay on the
Club Foot, and Other Distortions in the Legs and Feet of Children
(1798). These famous doctors all conceded that little could be
done to correct a deformity that might have been cured by the use
of special braces throughout childhood. Dr. Baillie records the
upshot: "Mr. Sheldrake . . . attended Lord B. and made him some
instruments for his foot which were continued in use for a short
Time but were afterwards given up for a Boot which he constructed
for him" (Marchand, Byron, i, 54). Byron's new boot, I will
argue, puts his body on a different footing from most people's.
His prosthesis, in other words, alters his stance, his sense of
human embodiment. Drawing upon Foucault's cartography of
"discipline" in post-revolutionary European culture, I will
suggest that Byron's prosthetic embodiment challenges both the
consensus of contemporary medicine that the body is developing
organic whole and the characteristically romantic humanism
grounded therein. Such ideals are for Byron disciplinary
fictions. His boot produces another kind of body, a prosthetic
body irreducible to organism and inhabited by the inhuman. It
materializes a monstrous flesh, subject to deformity but
susceptible to change.
Byron's republicanism arises out of this new, prosthetic body.
The odd logic of the prosthesis reveals seeming unities to be
artificially produced; the human body is not a natural organism
but a prosthetic effect. Little wonder, then, that Byron mocks
the conservative politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their
ostensible humanism occludes such effects in the name Nature,
Mind, and Imagination. Byron's poetry counters these ideals and
the imperialism they serve in several ways. It participates in a
cultural economy of prosthetics that challenges the ideal of an
organic body by insisting upon the primacy of warfare in
contemporary British society. It advances a politics of
monstrosity grounded in material embodiment by celebrating the
deeds of Napoleon, "the monster of Corsica." It exposes the
ideals of medicine and literature as disciplinary fictions by
dramatizing their effects upon the material body. I shall briefly
address each of these moves, the first by discussing the medical
treatment of war wounds, the second by examining the Napoleon's
representation in nationalist broadsides, and the third by
interpreting Byron's late play, The Deformed Transformed (1824),
as an allegory of political dis-embodiment. In each instance
Byron includes the prosthetic in his measure of humankind,
raising the possibility of a new body for humankind, a prosthetic
body inhabited by the inhuman.
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Last updated June 1, 1999
by Kathleen McConnell