London-Paris Romanticism Seminar launch: Christoph Bode, 21 October 2016, Senate House, London

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To inaugurate the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar we are proud to present Christoph Bode, a leading international scholar of British and European Romanticism and a renowned literary theorist and critic. His talk, entitled ‘De L’Allemagne with Love: English Bards and European Theorists’ (details below), will be followed by a discussion and a wine reception, to which all are invited. As a special guest at the launch event, we are also delighted to welcome Marc Porée, the Paris Director of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar.

The event will be held on Friday 21 October 2016 in Senate House, Malet Street, in the Bloomsbury Room (G35) on the ground floor, starting at 5.30 and finishing at 8. The extended reception will be an opportunity for Romanticists to meet one another, talk to our international visitors, and find out more about the new research forum. Everyone is welcome, including postgraduates and members of the public. Admission is free.

Our speaker, Christoph Bode, is Chair of Modern English Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, a Permanent Fellow of LMU’s Centre for Advanced Studies and a Member of the Academia Europaea. Former president of the German Society for English Romanticism, he has published 24 books and some 80 articles, mostly on Romanticism, Travel Writing, Poetics, and Critical Theory. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013 and the Walker Ames Lecture Prize of the University of Washington at Seattle in 2014. In 2015, he was admitted to the ‘High-End Foreign Experts Program’ of the People’s Republic of China, lecturing at Tsinghua University Beijing and at the University of Sichuan at Chengdu.

Regarding the subject of his talk, Christoph Bode writes:

‘The talk will take up and explain some key notions of German Frühromantik, e.g. Romantische Ironie or Transzendentalpoesie, explain how they relate to later phenomena like poésie pure, absolute literature, and sketch how these concepts fared in the twentieth century, especially in the hands of some French theorists. But it will also show, centrally, how in English Romanticism we do find the phenomena, though not the concepts. In any case, don’t panic: an earlier, discarded title of this talk was “KrautRom – So typical: Germans Claim to Have THEORY of What British Romantic Poets Just DID”. And this is still what it is, essentially, about.’

We hope you can join us for this exciting event.

David Duff (London Director, London-Paris Romanticism Seminar)