Romanticism at MLA 2019
If you’re headed to Chicago January 3-6 for the annual MLA conference (or if you’re keenly following for the live tweets!) over here at the K-SAA we’ve done a round-up of panels that might be interesting to our readership. Come one, come all Romanticists.Also, join us for the annual KSAA dinner and cash bar - more details on our home page!First up, the K-SAAs sponsored panel:593: Masks of Anarchy Now: Sites of Struggle5:15 PM–6:30 PM Saturday, Jan 5, 2019Hyatt Regency - Columbus CDPresentations:1: ‘Improvisation Is a Human Right’Julie Ann Carlson, U of California, Santa Barbara2: #MeToo: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Gender, and the Political PerformativeOrianne Smith, U of Maryland Baltimore County3: Suburban SubversionJeffrey Cox, U of Colorado, Boulder4: ‘A Volcano Heard Afar’: Shelley, Keats, and Genealogies of Resistance from the Global SouthJoselyn Almeida, U of Massachusetts, AmherstPresider: Kate Singer, Mt. Holyoke CThere are also many other offerings that might be of interest, listed below:030: Transatlantic Romanticisms Reviewed12:00 PM–1:15 PM Thursday, Jan 3, 2019Hyatt Regency - Columbus GPresentations:1: Transatlantic Networks and the London Literary MarketplaceJuliet Shields, U of Washington, Seattle2: Goethe’s Flower Child: Mignon in the American Educational GardenJustin Nevin, Binghamton U, State U of New York3: John Galt’s Eco-nasty Utopia: The Colonization of Canada and the Dark Side of Romantic EcologyJeffrey Cass, U of Houston, VictoriaRelated Material: For related material, write to soliver@essex.ac.uk after 1 Dec.Presider: Susan Oliver, U of Essex074: Reading Forward Backward1:45 PM–3:00 PM Thursday, Jan 3, 2019Hyatt Regency - Columbus ABDescription:This session, for those invested in the theory, history, and practice of reading, asks, Does reading really have a history? If so, does it move in a straight line, successive phases demarcated by periods? Or how does reading’s history move? How are we to read it? We invite nineteenth-century specialists to read backward and eighteenth-century specialists to read forward, thus testing the limits of historicist reading and the durability of specific reading praxes and literary tropologies.Presiders:Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, U of California, IrvineDaniel Akiva Novak, U of Alabama, TuscaloosaSpeakers:Talia Schaffer, Graduate Center, City U of New YorkDevoney Looser, Arizona State UJohn M. G. Plotz, Brandeis UMonique Allewaert, U of Wisconsin, MadisonDennis Denisoff, U of TulsaThomas Salem Manganaro, U of Richmond095: John Clare and Science3:30 PM–4:45 PM Thursday, Jan 3, 2019Hyatt Regency – AtlantaPresentations:1: John Clare’s Local BotanyEliza Holmes, Harvard U2: Toward a Scientific Aesthetic: John Clare’s ‘Man of Science and of Taste’Richard Ness, U of Wisconsin, Madison3: ‘Bits of Lichen and a Sprig of Moss’: Clare’s Linnaean EncountersChristy Edwall, New C, U of OxfordPresider: Nancy M. Derbyshire, Borough of Manhattan Community C, City U of New York149: Romantic Commonplaces7:00 PM–8:15 PM Thursday, Jan 3, 2019Hyatt Regency - Columbus ABPresentations:1: Reading Romantic CommonplacesTimothy Heimlich, U of California, Berkeley2: The Commonplace Tradition and the Romantic ParadoxJillian Hess, Bronx Community C, City U of New York3: Lord Byron and Writing about Common ThingsGary R. Dyer, Cleveland State U4: Ghost Dancing and Other Practices of Everyday LifeSonia Hofkosh, Tufts UPresider: Margaret E. Russett, U of Southern California365: 1819 in 20195:15 PM–6:30 PM Friday, Jan 4, 2019Hyatt Regency - Columbus HDescription:Participants will discuss the relevance of 1819 for our contemporary moment, where 1819 refers both to the events of that year and to James Chandler’s foundational work, England in 1819.Presider:Jonathan Sachs, Concordia U, MontrealSpeakers:Ian Duncan, U of California, BerkeleyAmanda Jo Goldstein, U of California, BerkeleyDeidre Lynch, Harvard UJosephine McDonagh, U of ChicagoJerome J. McGann, U of VirginiaRespondent: James Chandler, U of Chicago469: Romantic Elements: Earth, Air, Water and Fire10:15 AM–11:30 AM Saturday, Jan 5, 2019Hyatt Regency - Grand Suite 5Presentations:1: Romantic Continent-Elements: The Divine Fire from AfricaPaul Cheshire, independent scholar2: Streaming Wordsworth; or, Romantic HydrographyJacob Risinger, Ohio State U, Columbus3: Wordsworth’s Undaunted River DuddonRalph Pite, U of Bristol4: Of Ice and Men: American Romantics in Antarctica, 1840Gillen D’Arcy Wood, U of Illinois, UrbanaPresider: James C. McKusick, U of Missouri, Kansas City472: Romanticism and Embodied Cognition12:00 PM–1:15 PM Saturday, Jan 5, 2019Hyatt Regency - Columbus KLPresentations:1: Experimental Meters and Gothic Histories of CognitionJohn Savarese, U of Waterloo2: Sensitive Plants and Senseless Weeds: Plants and Consciousness in Flora DomesticaLeila Walker, Queens C, City U of New York3: Embodied Cognition and the Structures of Romantic ExperienceLisa Ann Robertson, U of South DakotaPresider: Richard C. Sha, American URespondent: Jonathan Kramnick, Yale U516: Un(der)represented Voices and Texts in Global Romanticism1:45 PM–3:00 PM Saturday, Jan 5, 2019Hyatt Regency – AtlantaDescription:This session adds to the growing interest in transnational studies that seek to expand Romanticism’s literal and metaphorical borders by discussing authors and texts that, though currently un(der)represented, provide crucial insights into one of the most revolutionary periods in global history.Related Material: For related material, write to CStampone@smu.eduSpeakers:Christopher Stampone, Bethel UOmar F. Miranda, U of San FranciscoDeanna Koretsky, Spelman CLindsey Seatter, U of VictoriaJoel Frederic Pace, U of Wisconsin, Eau ClairePresider: Manu Chander, Rutgers U, Newark686: Forms of Uprising12:00 PM–1:15 PM Sunday, Jan 6, 2019Hyatt Regency - Columbus EFPresentations:1: Can a Theory of Revolution Also Be a Theory of War?Jan Mieszkowski, Reed C2: On Reading Homer More Than Every Now and Then: Cowper, Fuseli, and the Post-American WorldDaniel O’Quinn, U of Guelph3: Reading as Uprising: Keats, Wordsworth, and RancièreEmily Rohrbach, U of ManchesterPresider: Mark E. Canuel, U of Illinois, ChicagoFinally, you can also join the “Romanticism Now” Working Group.To join the conversation and read the papers before the convention, email elizabeth.fay@umb.edu for access to this MLA Commons Group.'We propose the “Romanticism Now” Working Group to tap into the various strategies Romanticists are using to posit historical relations as non-linear and entangled, but also to explore how romanticism, as an aesthetic and political movement, might help literary scholars rethink historical methodologies. Romanticism in both its theoretical and literary investigations, from Britain and the Americas to Europe, intersects with the historical unfolding of eventfulness in ways that inter-act with how we are experiencing the unfolding of politics and crises today. These literatures are deep resources for thinking through today’s eventfulness; they need to be brought into dialogue as a kind of parataxis that then becomes a site of potentiality. Indeed, the playfulness of paralogic and its usefulness in confronting paradox, might be useful here, since logic is at a standstill when “facts” and “truth statements” are said not to align.[...]We anticipate that the ten pre-circulated papers and five-minute presentations in each of the two sessions will allow for a free flow of ideas across historical and ahistorical approaches, and produce a productive conversation about the deep connections between experiencing texts and participating in eventfulness. Our goal is to produce two kinds of projects: a special issue of scholarly articles, and a pedagogy project that includes both a special issue of pedagogical essays including affiliated syllabi and more public-facing student interventions such as course blogs.The first session considers questions related to historiography, the anthropocene and object theory. Participants consider the entanglement of history with questions of materiality as a site of global politics and climate change.The second session considers media, form, and poetics in romanticism and the romantic now; three of the papers take Keats as a poet of the romantic now.'More info here.Happy conferencing!