**For publications arising from these events, see our Publications page
Romantic Shock and Surprise
2025 Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar
Sorbonne Université, Paris, Friday 16 – Saturday 17 May 2025
Keynote speakers: Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St Andrews), Christopher Miller (College of Staten Island, CUNY)
Scroll down for Introductory statement / Call for papers (closed)
PROGRAMME
FRIDAY 16 MAY
10h Welcome and registration: Salle des Actes, Sorbonne Université, 1 rue de la Sorbonne/ 54 rue Saint-Jacques/ 14 rue Cujas, Paris 75005
10h15 Presentation: London-Paris Romanticism Seminar (Laurent Folliot, Paris Director and David Duff, London Director); Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais (Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, President)
10h30 Panel: Translating Revolutionary Shock (Chair: Laurent Folliot)
Rosa Mucignat (KCL): Revolutionary Shocks in Translation: Political and Linguistic Change in the Discourse of Radical Translators (1789-1815)
Jacob McGuinn (Northeastern London): Astonishment of Ruins: Translation, Historicity, and the French Revolution
11h30 COFFEE BREAK
12h Keynote Lecture: Stephanie O’Rourke (St Andrews): Romantic Shock and Industrial Catastrophe
13h LUNCH
14h30 Panel: The Aesthetics of Surprise (Salle Louis-Bonnerot) (Chair: Sophie Laniel-Musitelli)
Marc Porée (ENS, Paris): A Grammar of Surprise
Sophie Thomas (Toronto Metropolitan): ‘Marmoreality’: Re-animating the Classical Body in the Romantic Present
15h30 COFFEE BREAK
16h Panel: Ecological and Physiological Shock (Salle Louis-Bonnerot) (Chair: Omar Miranda)
Markus Poetzsch (Wilfrid Laurier): “Proging” the Darkness in John Clare’s “The Mouse’s Nest”
Merrilees Roberts (QMUL/IES Abroad London): P. B. Shelley’s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude and the Poetics of Shock Fatigue
17h RECEPTION
SATURDAY 17 MAY
9h15 Welcome and registration: Salle Louis-Bonnerot (English faculty library), Sorbonne Université, 1 rue de la Sorbonne / 54 rue Saint-Jacques/ 14 rue Cujas, Paris 75005
9h30 Panel: Varieties of Gothic Shock (Chair: David Duff)
Sharon Choe (Copenhagen): Death Songs, Gore, and the Norse-Gothic Spectacle
Eleanor Franzén (Birkbeck): “A momentary horror”: Mary Robinson’s Vancenza and the Shock of History
Pauline Hortolland (Besançon): “A flock of vampire-bats before the glare / Of the tropic sun”: Shelley’s Poetics of Gothic Shock in The Triumph of Life
11h COFFEE BREAK
11h30 Keynote lecture: Christopher Miller (Staten Island, CUNY): “Surprised and not surprised”: The Varieties of Astonishment in Austen’s Novels
12h30 LUNCH
14h Panel: Theatrical Shock and its Marketing (Chair: Marc Porée)
Deven Parker (Glasgow): Shocking Bodies: Images of Empire in Romantic Playbills
Henry James Mason (QMUL): Selling Shock at the Sans Pareil: The Early Shows of Jane and John Scott
15h COFFEE BREAK
15h30 Panel: Shock and the Spectrum of Fiction (Chair: Christoph Bode)
Gary Kelly (Alberta): “Shock” in/and/of Romantic Novelistic Discourse
Ian Balfour (York, Ontario): Shock and its Absence: Terror and Temporality in Long, Short, and Medium Gothic Fictions
16h30 END OF CONFERENCE
Introductory statement / Call for papers (closed)
The ‘shock of the new’ is a phrase normally associated with Modernism but the aesthetics of shock has its roots in Romanticism, where notions of originality, novelty and surprise combined with the concept of the sublime and other theories of affect to create compelling new descriptions of art’s disruptive powers. Keats’s dictum that poetry ‘must surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity’ is one example, posing the paradox that art can be simultaneously startling and unobtrusive. Shelley’s provocative account of how poetry ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world’ to lay bare the ‘naked and sleeping beauty’ beneath is another, one of many anticipations in Romantic thought of Ezra Pound’s injunction, a century later, to ‘make it new’, or of the theory of defamiliarization propounded by the Russian Formalists. A third instance can be found in Wordsworth’s ambition, at least according to Coleridge, to ‘give the charm of novelty to things of every day’ in his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads project.
This disruptive, defamiliarizing power was not confined to professedly innovative art. Archaism – the ‘shock of the old’ – was an equally potent force, exemplified by the Gothic novel (or Schauerroman, ‘shudder-novel’), in which violent subject matter and fabricated medieval pasts were used to generate readerly frissons from emotions of fear and repugnance. The German Sturm und Drang movement in drama and melodrama was a related development, condemned by Wordsworth as a corrupting influence whose effects were to be counteracted by more subtle and salubrious forms of imaginative stimulation (the adjectival qualifiers of ‘gentle shock of mild surprise’ in ‘There was a boy’ are an index of this recalibration). According to Christopher Miller,[1] another strand in this complex web of generic displacements and rivalries was the appropriation by Romantic lyric poetry of the dynamics of surprise associated with eighteenth-century adventure narrative, now transposed into unexpected sequences of mental ‘events’ and linguistic special effects. Wordsworth’s ‘Surprised by Joy’ is the paradigm but such unpredictable lyric ‘plots’ were ubiquitous.
One of the drivers in this new affective poetics was political. When Shelley in his romantic epic The Revolt of Islam spoke of the ‘shock and surprise’ of ‘earthly minds’, he was remembering the psychic turbulence of the French Revolution, whose traumatic legacy for former liberals he sought to alleviate with his own immersive story of failed but redemptive revolution. The Marquis de Sade likewise connected the violence and extravagance of the Gothic novel with ‘the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded’ in the wake of 1789. Hazlitt drew similar parallels in The Spirit of the Age, much of which is devoted to analysis of the public addiction to a literature built around sensations of shock and surprise (‘A poem is to resemble an exhibition of fireworks … that surprise for the moment, and leave no trace of light or warmth behind them’).
Another driver was science and technology. Public interest in the rapidly developing science of electricity, including the invention of the Voltaic pile, generated a rich metaphorical vocabulary for describing aesthetic experience. As Stephanie O’Rourke has shown,[2] the idea that powerful artworks could produce responses equivalent to ‘electric shock’ gained widespread currency, as did the idea that electrical currents were analogous to other forms of rapid, high-energy transmission, notably the spread of revolutionary politics. Theatres harnessed the emergent technology to create startling new stage spectacles, encouraging a similarly spectacular acting style (as Coleridge famously remarked, seeing Edmund Kean act ‘was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’). Other scientific and cultural fields contributed their own share of shocks and surprises, challenging writers to match their discoveries and reinforcing the idea that the ‘march of intellect’ was anything but straightforward.
This two-day symposium will explore the sources and effects of this new poetics, examining manifestations of aesthetic shock and surprise across a wide spectrum of Romantic literature from Britain and beyond. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of this broad theme. Topics may include but are not confined to:
- shock and excess in the theory of the sublime
- Romantic shock and the eighteenth-century emphasis on the new
- affect theory and the cognitive poetics of shock and surprise
- shock and surprise in the literature of revolution
- tales of the unexpected in Romantic prose and verse
- shifting thresholds of aesthetic shock; ‘shock fatigue’
- gendered aesthetics of surprise and shock
- shock and surprise in Gothic fiction, poetry and drama
- shell-shock and post-traumatic stress in the Romantic literature of war
- shock as a propaganda tool in anti-slavery literature
- rhetorical and grammatical production of surprise
- analogies between scientific and literary shock
- shock and surprise in the language of advertising
- flashes, explosions and other spectacular effects on the Romantic stage
Organisers: Laurent Folliot (Sorbonne Université) lfolliot@yahoo.fr and David Duff (Queen Mary University of London) d.duff@qmul.ac.uk
Scientific Committee: Professor Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble Alpes), Professor David Duff (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Laurent Folliot (Sorbonne Université), Professor Jean-Marie Fournier (Université Paris Cité), Professor Sophie Laniel-Musitelli (Université de Lille/ Institut Universitaire de France), Professor Marc Porée (ENS Ulm, Paris).
[1] Christopher Miller, Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen (Cornell UP, 2015)
[2] Stephanie O’Rourke, Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Oaths, Odes and Orations 1789-1830
2022 Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar
Friday 9 and Saturday 10 December 2022
Maison de la recherche, Sorbonne Université (Friday) and Ecole Normale Supérieure (Saturday)
Scroll down for introductory statement / CFP
PROGRAMME
FRIDAY 9 DECEMBER
10h Welcome and registration: Maison de la recherche, 18 rue Serpente
10h15 Presentation: London-Paris Romanticism Seminar (Marc Porée, Paris director and David Duff, London director); Presentation: SERA (Caroline Bertonèche, President)
10h30 Panel – Revolutionary Voices
Pierre LURBE (Sorbonne Université) ‘“The spouting rant of high-toned exclamation”: The Art of Oral/Aural Caricature in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man’
Robert W. JONES (University of Leeds) ‘Rhetoric, Resistance and the Nation: Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Speech, 20 April 1798’
11h30 COFFEE BREAK
12h Keynote Lecture 1
Francesco BUSCEMI (University of Groningen) ‘How To Do Things with Oaths: Militancy and Loyalty in the French Revolution’
13h LUNCH
14h30 Panel — Varieties of Oratory
Dafydd MOORE (University of Plymouth) ‘Richard Polwhele and Pulpit Oratory in the Eighteenth-century English Province’
Anna ANSELMO (University of Ferrara) ‘Henry “Orator” Hunt’s Letters to the Manchester Magistrates: Illocutionary Acts and the Representation of Social Actors’
15h30 COFFEE BREAK
16h Keynote Lecture 2
Judith THOMPSON (Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia) ‘Thelwall’s French Connection: La Voix de la Girouette’
17h RECEPTION
SATURDAY 10 DECEMBER
9h15 Welcome and registration: Salle Celan, ENS, rue d’Ulm
9h30 Panel – The Ode: Form and Function
Will BOWERS (Queen Mary University of London) ‘The Ode Disinterred’
Paul HAMILTON (Queen Mary University of London) ‘Odes et al.’
10h30 COFFEE BREAK
11h Panel – Performative Language and Public Address
Catherine BOIS (Université Paris Nanterre) ‘Poetic/Rhetorical Ethos and the Performative Power of Words in The Prelude, Books 9-10’
David DUFF (Queen Mary University of London) ‘Blake’s Public Addresses’
12h LUNCH
13h30 Keynote Lecture 3
Rémy DUTHILLE (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) ‘Toasting, Oratory and Parody in 1790s Britain’
14hr30 END OF CONFERENCE
Introductory statement / CFP
The Tennis Court Oath of 20 June 1789 was the first overtly revolutionary act of the French Revolution and marked the beginning of an epoch in which public speech acts took on unprecedented political significance. The ceremonial odes and hymns of the fêtes de fédération were another manifestation of this renascence of orality, restoring the ancient Pindaric tradition of poetry as public performance and giving new meaning to odic conventions such as invocation, exhortation and apostrophe. In the work of André Chénier and others, this new lyric function produced major poetry. Meanwhile, in the halls of the political clubs, in the National Convention and revolutionary Committees, and from lecterns, pulpits and courtroom benches across France, oratory of all kinds shaped the course of history and decided the fate of individuals. Even on the executioner’s scaffold, rhetorical amplification became the preferred mode of address, a grim illustration of Baudelaire’s subsequent observation about ‘the grandiloquent truth of gestures on life’s great occasions’.
The revitalisation of performative language was not confined to the 1789 Revolution, nor to France. Britain experienced what many still consider a golden age of political eloquence, as orators of the calibre of Pitt, Burke, Fox and Sheridan jousted in parliament and extended their orations through the medium of print. Outside parliament, the growth of the corresponding societies, of other political clubs and associations, and of political lecturing created numerous opportunities for public address, the communicative practices and clandestine rituals of certain organisations attracting repressive measures such as the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797. Radical writers mimicked French revolutionary styles in odes to Liberty and on the Bastille, while satirists parodied their efforts in mock-odes to the guillotine and pseudo-songs travestying revolutionary enthusiasm. Sermons, notably in the Nonconformist churches, were another front in the oral war of ideas, fusing religion and politics in provocative ways. Educational lecturing also underwent a remarkable boom, in the new Royal Institution and other fashionable lecturing institutions.
This two-day symposium will assess the literary significance of this mobilisation of orality and public utterance, and explore links between the speech acts of politicians, polemicists and educators and the writings of poets and other authors. How is the Romantic revaluation of the ode which produced the famous lyrics of Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Victor Hugo – and of less well-known figures such as Southey, Hemans, Iolo Morganwg and Peter Pindar – connected with the revival of ceremonial ode-writing and public ritual? How are the ‘speech genres’ of everyday life integrated into the more complex genres of imaginative literature, as Bakhtin postulated? Can speech-writing, sermonising or toast-making be themselves a form of literary activity? What happens when legally, morally binding oaths and commitments are broken, forcing the swearer to recant, in public again – are such disavowals part of the culture of apostasy and disenchantment posited by literary historians of Romanticism? And to what extent do these purposive deployments of public speech enter the literary and rhetorical theory of the period?
We invite proposals on any aspect of the literary and verbal life of Britain and France from 1789 to 1830 that relates to this broad set of issues. Topics may include but are not confined to:
- Oaths, affirmations and other verbal rituals
- Toasts and toasting
- Public lectures and lecturing
- Denunciation, recantation and confession
- Proclamations, declarations and vindications
- Odes, hymns and songs
- Apostrophe, personification and other poetic devices
- Literature and public ceremony
- Dialectic of publicness and privacy in Romantic lyric
- Political, religious and forensic oratory
- Illocutionary acts and performative language
- Gendered eloquence
- Dialogues and dialogism
- Rhetorical theory of the Romantic period
Scientific Committee
Prof Marc Porée (ENS Ulm, Paris)
Prof David Duff (Queen Mary University of London)
Prof Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble Alpes/ Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais)
Dr Laurent Folliot (Sorbonne Université)
Dr Sophie Laniel-Musitelli (Université de Lille/ Institut Universitaire de France)
Romanticism at the Royal Institution
International symposium, Friday 7 June 2019, 14.00-20.00
The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS
Speakers: David Duff, Frank James, Hattie Lloyd Edmondson, Seamus Perry, Sharon Ruston, Sarah Zimmerman
Founded in 1799, the Royal Institution became the home of science education and the site of scientific discoveries and technological innovations which changed the world. In its early years, this remarkable scientific agenda was accompanied by an equally impressive programme of literary education, as luminaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Campbell and Sydney Smith took to the lecture podium to dazzle the fashionable male and female audiences of London with the latest advances in literary criticism and aesthetics. Science, poetry and philosophy combined in the work of the ‘chemical philosopher’ Humphry Davy and his literary friends, making the Royal Institution a centre of Romanticism as well as a focal point of the thriving public lecture culture of the time. This half-day symposium with talks by leading scholars will restore the forgotten literary history of the Royal Institution and highlight its unique interdisciplinary contribution to British Romantic culture.
This event is free and open to everyone, including members of the public.
Click here for further details and to register for a free place
Organisers: David Duff d.duff@qmul.ac.uk; Sarah Zimmerman Zimmerman@fordham.edu
Sponsored by the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar consortium, the Fordham Romanticism Group, New York, Queen Mary University of London and the Royal Institution, London
PROGRAMME
13.30 Registration
14.00 Welcome
14.15 David Duff (Queen Mary University of London) Announcing Knowledge: Prospectuses at the Royal Institution
14.45 Hattie Lloyd Edmondson (Science Museum) Rulers of Opinion: Women at the Royal Institution, 1799-1812
15.15 Sharon Ruston (Lancaster University) Humphry Davy: Poet and Reader of Poetry
15.45 Tea and coffee
16.15 Seamus Perry (University of Oxford) Coleridge in the Lecture Theatre
16.45 Frank James (Royal Institution) The Very Young Humphry Davy
17.15 Sarah Zimmerman (Fordham University, New York) Thomas Campbell at the Royal Institution
17.45 Tour of Royal Institution (led by Frank James)
18.30 Wine reception and book launch
20.00 Finish
Exiles, Émigrés and Expatriates in Romantic-Era Paris and London
2018 Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar
École Normale Supérieure, Thursday 12-Friday 13 April 2018
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
(Scroll down for Introductory Statement/ CFP)
THURSDAY 12 April
8h30: Welcome and registration (Amphithéâtre Jourdan, 48 Boulevard Jourdan)
8h45: Presentation Paris Symposium (Marc Porée, Paris director and David Duff, London director)
CHAIR: Laurent FOLLIOT
9h: Friedemann PESTEL (Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg)
Rien appris? Émigré children novels, French émigré schools, and the challenge of education in exile
9h45: Juliette REBOUL (Radboud University, Nijmegen)
‘There was little that we did not know from Cléry and other publications’: Circulation and reception of French emigrant literature in London (1789-1830)
10h30: COFFEE BREAK
11h: Paul HAMILTON (Queen Mary University of London)
Foscolo in London, Tom Moore on the road: Two uses of Romantic exile
11h45: Philipp HUNNEKUHL (University of Hamburg)
‘Alien citizen’, ‘unofficial statesman’, ‘Diogenes of Paris’: Gustav von Schlabrendorf and Henry Crabb Robinson’s transmission of his work
12h30: LUNCH
Salle Dussane, École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm
CHAIR: Marc PORÉE
14h: PLENARY (1): Gregory DART (University College London)
Revolutionary transformations in Beethoven’s Fidelio
15h: COFFEE BREAK
CHAIR: Caroline BERTONÈCHE
15h30: Emma CLERY (University of Southampton)
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Paris Address
16h15: Barbara WITUCKI (Utica College, New York)
Frances Burney’s Napoleonic wanderer
17h: Stacie ALLAN (University of Bristol)
Articulating the experience of exile through English poetry: Germaine de Staël and Claire de Duras
17h45: RECEPTION
FRIDAY 13 April
8h30: Welcome and registration (Room D035, Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente)
CHAIR: Jean-Marie FOURNIER
9h: Christoph BODE (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
Georg(e) Forster in Paris (1793/94)
9h45: Ed WEECH (SOAS, University of London)
‘Paris to a stranger is a desert full of knaves & whores – like London’: Thomas Manning’s Romantic Europe, 1802-1805
10h30: COFFEE BREAK
11h: Dominic Aidan BELLENGER (Bath Spa University)
The exile of the French clergy in the British Isles, 1789-1815
11h45: Richard THOLONIAT (Le Mans University)
René-Martin Pillet (1762-1815)’s L’Angleterre vue à Londres et dans ses provinces pendant un séjour de dix années, dont six comme prisonnier de guerre (1815): a French Republican’s jaundiced view of Britain?
12h30: LUNCH
CHAIR: David DUFF
14h: PLENARY (2): Rachel ROGERS (University of Toulouse)
‘Relinquish[ing] all former connections’: British radical experience in early revolutionary Paris
15h: COFFEE BREAK
CHAIR: Sophie LANIEL-MUSITELLI
15h30: Alessandro PECORARO (University of Florence/ Paris-Sorbonne/ Bonn)
‘A double source of amusement in listening to him’: Ugo Foscolo’s last lecture in London
16h15: Pierre-Héli MONOT (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
The overdetermination of origins: Romantic internationalism, Jewish statelessness, and interpretative exile
17h: END OF CONFERENCE
INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT / CFP
Of the émigrés returning to France after the fall of Napoléon and the restoration of the Bourbons, Talleyrand, the Prince of Diplomats, notoriously quipped: “Ils n’ont rien appris, rien oublié”; “They have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing”. Characteristic and accurate as it may have been, that contemporary response falls far short of the complex truth of displacement, of which emigration, exile and expatriation are crucially emblematic components. Crucial but highly differentiated. Whereas the émigré has tended to be viewed as a coward or a traitor to his nation, bitterly vilified as such, at least in the French Republican historiography, the exile has frequently been invested with a heroic status, and construed as outshining other foreigners in view of the moral and symbolic superiority ascribed to him, rightly or wrongly. As for expatriates, they have tended to occupy a grey zone of their own, a no man’s land of definitions, as befits their condition of residence, provisionary or permanent, in a country that is not their own, with specific reference to the last decade of the eighteenth century and early decades of the nineteenth, in and out of Paris and London.
The first aim of the Symposium, therefore, should be to sort out the semantics of the triple-E triad present in the title. Other topical, and highly sensitive, terms of the day, such as refugees or migrants, should also be investigated in the large context of the nineteenth-century, “the century of exiles”, as postulated by Sylvie Aprile[1], but also the century of revolutions, leading to the emergence of a new figure, a “personnage conceptuel”, as it were (Gilles Deleuze), that of the political refugee. Secondly, we feel that the dominant ideological assumptions and axiological preferences cited above deserve a good amount of scrutiny, as to their real rather than alleged historical fairness. Thirdly, we intend to learn from what expatriates, exiles and émigrés no doubt did learn and remember. Our instinct, indeed, is that there is a vast lore or body of knowledge waiting to be explored, regarding the broadly cognitive dimensions of what it means, and feels, to find oneself cut off from, say Paris or London. If that implies giving the lie to Talleyrand, who served as French Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1830-1834, so be it ! Whether the claim may be made, as has been contended by Richard Sennett, that there is virtually more to be won than lost from being a foreigner, like Alexander Herzen, a Russian aristocrat forced abroad because of his politics and perambulating the capitals of Europe (Rome, Geneva, Paris, London), with his bearings more or less randomly adrift, is something we will be wanting to look at very closely[2]. New forms of community were undeniably wrought from admittedly angst-ridden experiences such as exposure to others, loss of identity, separateness, segregation, ostracism, isolation, stigmatization; on the other hand, there were at least as many grievous memories of friends, relatives and prospects left behind as there were new opportunities and acculturations looming ahead.
Again, differentiation is of the essence: we will need to draw the line between temporary and permanent exile, the desire to return “home” or the resistance to that return, “inner émigré” (Seamus Heaney’s word, in 1975) and outer émigrés, the truths to be discovered in becoming a foreigner abroad versus the truths of place, belonging and rootedness. Differentiating between travelling and residing, moving freely through the country and being placed under house arrest, will also be of moot importance.
While it may very well intersect with widely explored issues such as location, dislocation, transculturality, transnationality, we are convinced that the topic of the Symposium leaves us plenty of room in which to navigate, manoeuver and draft an agenda of our own. That agenda will address the geography, the history, the economics, the sociology, the demography, the linguistics of, without forgetting the legal discourse on, exile, emigration and expatriation—on an individual basis as well as from the perspective of entire communities, small or large (the French in London[3], the Brits or the Greeks in Paris, the Italians, the Germans or the Swiss, etc.). So will it connect itself to the larger issue of Hospitality versus Inhospitality. Indeed, observing today the extent to which, for the refugees in Calais, Boulogne, Paris, London, it is truly a matter of life or death whether they will be crossing a border or not, finding a job or not, should bring us to rethink the relevance, yesterday, of terms such as “host culture” or “playing host to”, no doubt with a sense of greater urgency.
But we will certainly be encouraging papers seeking to explore the more explicitly literary and cultural implications and developments of the theme, across the period from 1789 to the post-1815 years and beyond. Of which here is a list, including, but not limited to:
— Publishing, writing, translating, studying, reading (from) abroad
— Semi-clandestine, semi-official trafficking in cultural goods (cf. Michel Espagne’s concept of « Transferts culturels[4] »)
— Displacement, exile, expatriation in novelistic prose (the character Charles Darnay, in A Tale of Two Cities), in drama and in verse
— Great men in exile (Chateaubriand or Stendhal, typically) and the anonymous many
— Gendered expatriation
— Exile and the rigours of proscription
— Europeans on the move as a cultural narrative of the Romantic age
— The poetics of the return of the émigré/ expat/ exile: (after the fashion of the “return of the ashes” of Napoléon Bonaparte to France, in 1840)
— Exiles and Place (cf. Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
— Hostility to, and welcome of, foreigners and foreign cultures
— Modes and manners of forced estrangement
— Specific émigré communities (the Germans, the Swiss, the Italians, etc.)
References
[1] Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés. Bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune, Paris, CNRS éditions, 2010; “Europe and Its Political Refugees in the 19th Century”, by Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz, translated by Kate Macnaughton, 18 April 2016
[2] Richard Sennett, The Foreigner Two Essays on Exile, London: Notting Hill Editions, 2017.
[3] A History of the French in London: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity, edited by Debra Kelly, Martyn Cornick, University of London, 2013. Cf. Juliette Reboul’s French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
[4] Michel Espagne, Michael Werner, Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe – XIXe siècles), Paris: Editions Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1988.
Scientific Committee
Prof Marc Porée (ENS Ulm, Paris)
Prof David Duff (Queen Mary University of London)
Prof Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble Alpes/ Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais)
Dr Laurent Folliot (Université Paris-Sorbonne)
Prof Jean-Marie Fournier (Université Paris Diderot)
Dr Sophie Laniel-Musitelli (Université de Lille/ Institut Universitaire de France)
Wordsworth: The French Connection
2017 Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar
École Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Paris, Thursday 20 – Friday 21 April 2017
*** Go to Publications page to download a free special issue of Litteraria Pragensia based on papers given at this symposium. ***
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
(Scroll down for Introductory Statement/ CFP)
THURSDAY 20 April
13h30: Welcome and registration
13h45: Presentation London-Paris Romanticism Seminar (Marc Porée, Paris Director/ David Duff, London Director) Presentation SERA (Caroline Bertonèche, President)
CHAIR: Jean-Marie Fournier
14h: PLENARY (1)
Le romantisme français et l’Angleterre du XIXè siècle: une filiation inavouable
Pr. Alain Vaillant (Université Paris Ouest – Nanterre)
15h: COFFEE BREAK
CHAIR: David Duff
15h30:
Returning, Retrieving, Revising: Wordsworth’s Life Writing asWiederholungszwang (repetition urge)
Pr. Christoph Bode (LMU Munich)
16h15:
Imagining the Difference: Prefigurations of Poststructuralism in The Prelude
Pr. Martin Prochazka (Charles University, Prague)
17h:
Translating Wordsworth into French
Pr. Marc Porée (ENS Ulm, Paris)
17h45: Refreshments
18h-19h: ROUND TABLE on The Prelude (French books, French translations…)
FRIDAY 21 April:
8h30: Welcome and registration
CHAIR: Laurent Folliot
9h: PLENARY (2)
“I took fire”: Wordsworth’s Sonnet War with France, 1802-1820
Pr. Simon Bainbridge (Lancaster University)
10h:
“Back turned, arms folded!”: Wordsworth’s Late Sonnets and the French Revolution Revised
Christy Edwall (New College, Oxford University)
10h45: COFFEE BREAK
CHAIR: Marc Porée
11h15:
“Dreadful Satisfactions”: Literature, Sex and Revolutionary Violence in Wordsworth’s Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff
Pr. David Duff (Queen Mary, University of London)
12h:
Wordsworth and France, 1790-1924 and Beyond: A History of Incomprehension?
Dr. Laurent Folliot (Université Paris-Sorbonne)
12h45: Closing remarks
13h: End of conference
INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT/ CFP
Under the deliberately provocative title of “The French Connection,” a series of propositions will be made by the organizers of the Anglo-French/Franco-English Symposium:
— that France was to William Wordsworth what Germany was to S.T. Coleridge, Italy to P.B. Shelley and Greece to Lord Byron. A “strange attractor”, in short. As well as a site of contradictions, where delinquency and propriety, misconduct and righteousness came to a head, leading to endless visions and revisions, visitings and revisitings, all subsumed under the general heading of Crime and Punishment.
— that to William Wordsworth (and Robert Jones), fresh from their crossing over to Calais, the July of the first Fête de la Fédération, in 1790, felt like Spring, as argued by Jacques Rancière in his Courts voyages au pays du peuple(Seuil, 1990), with “benevolence and blessedness / Spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring / Hath left no corner of the land untouched” (The Prelude 1850, l. 357-359)… To be followed by the autumn and the winter of disenchantment and radical disaffiliation. After claiming the equivalent of a flamboyantly Hugolian “Je suis la Révolution”, was Wordsworth not to retort : “Je n’ai jamais été la Révolution” ?
— that the French years of William Wordsworth are to be perceived as more than “years”; they should be conceived of as a “Period”, decisively formative and pointedly characteristic, as in, say, the Blue or Rose Period of Picasso.
— that those years and months and days are far from having delivered all their secrets, of a private, emotional, sexual, political, public nature, virtually vindicating André Malraux’s controversial contention: “Pour l’essentiel, l’homme est ce qu’il cache : un misérable petit tas de secrets.” (Antimémoires)
— that France is an important landmark in the discussion of such a notion as “Wordsworth and Place”, along the lines of Stephen Cheeke’s Byron and Place : History, Translation, Nostalgia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Likewise, we aim at availing ourselves of a broad field of enquiry known as “new geography” or “cultural geography”, which draws on a wide range of cognate disciplines and aims at a sustained rethinking of space and place, including “topo-biographical studies.” Translation studies will also be solicited, in view of the two recent translations into French of The Prelude: by Denis Bonnecase, in 2013, and by Maxime Durisotti, in 2016.
— that the long and short of Wordsworth’s trips to France (including the one in 1820, to Paris and the Musée du Louvre, where he met Annette Vallon [“Madame William”] and Caroline for the last time) has to do, essentially, with coming home. That the point of travelling is not how one goes abroad and what one discovers there–nor is it about how one talks about places one has never been to, as Pierre Bayard would mischievously argue. No, Wordsworth did go to France, but the problem is how did he go back to England, and in what state or condition ?
From which it follows that the Symposium will be exploring the critical relevance of five verbs of action, forming a sequence : Partir / Revenir / Devenir / Traduire / Trahir // Leaving / Returning / Becoming / Translating / Betraying.
Only connect… the prose and the passion !
List of possible topics:
- Wordsworth and Revolutionary France
- Wordsworth and the French wars
- The Prelude and its revisions
- French translations of Wordsworth
- Paris in the 1790’s
- Wordsworth and Annette Vallon
- Vaudracour and Julia
- Wordsworth’s Continental tours
- Emigrants and borderers
- Wordsworth and Rousseau
- Wordsworth and French literature
- Wordsworth and French art (e.g. Charles Le Brun)
- History of Wordsworth scholarship in France
- Wordsworth and French literary theory
Scientific committee/steering group :
Marc Porée (ENS Ulm, Paris)
David Duff (Queen Mary University of London)
Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Laurent Folliot (Université Paris Sorbonne)
Jean-Marie Fournier (Université Paris Diderot)
Florence Gaillet-De Chezelles (Université de Bordeaux)
Pascale Guibert (Université de Besançon)
Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans (Université de Picardie)