{"id":668,"date":"2017-11-23T10:32:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-23T10:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/?page_id=668"},"modified":"2025-09-13T20:11:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T19:11:31","slug":"past-events","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/?page_id=668","title":{"rendered":"Past Events"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

**For publications arising from these events, see our Publications page<\/a><\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Romantic Shock and Surprise<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

2025 Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sorbonne Universit\u00e9, Paris<\/strong>, Friday 16 \u2013 Saturday 17 May 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Keynote speakers<\/em>: Stephanie O\u2019Rourke (University of St Andrews)<\/strong>, Christopher Miller (College of Staten Island, CUNY)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scroll down for Introductory statement \/ Call for papers (closed)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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PROGRAMME<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

FRIDAY 16 MAY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

10h Welcome and registration<\/strong>: Salle des Actes, Sorbonne Universit\u00e9, 1 rue de la Sorbonne\/ 54 rue Saint-Jacques\/ 14 rue Cujas, Paris 75005<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10h15 Presentation: London-Paris Romanticism Seminar<\/strong> (Laurent Folliot, Paris Director and David Duff, London Director); Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d\u2019\u00c9tudes du Romantisme Anglais<\/strong> (Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, President)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10h30 Panel: Translating Revolutionary Shock<\/strong> (Chair: Laurent Folliot)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rosa Mucignat (KCL)<\/strong>: Revolutionary Shocks in Translation: Political and Linguistic Change in the Discourse of Radical Translators (1789-1815)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jacob McGuinn (Northeastern London)<\/strong>: Astonishment of Ruins: Translation, Historicity, and the French Revolution<\/p>\n\n\n\n

11h30 COFFEE BREAK<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

12h Keynote Lecture: Stephanie O\u2019Rourke (St Andrews): <\/strong>Romantic Shock and Industrial Catastrophe<\/p>\n\n\n\n

13h LUNCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

14h30 Panel: The Aesthetics of Surprise<\/strong> (Salle Louis-Bonnerot) (Chair: Sophie Laniel-Musitelli)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marc Por\u00e9e (ENS, Paris)<\/strong>: A Grammar of Surprise<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sophie Thomas (Toronto Metropolitan)<\/strong>: \u2018Marmoreality\u2019: Re-animating the Classical Body in the Romantic Present<\/p>\n\n\n\n

15h30 COFFEE BREAK<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

16h Panel: Ecological and Physiological Shock<\/strong> (Salle Louis-Bonnerot) (Chair: Omar Miranda)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Markus Poetzsch (Wilfrid Laurier)<\/strong>: \u201cProging\u201d the Darkness in John Clare\u2019s \u201cThe Mouse\u2019s Nest\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Merrilees Roberts (QMUL\/IES Abroad London)<\/strong>: P. B. Shelley\u2019s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude<\/em> and the Poetics of Shock Fatigue<\/p>\n\n\n\n

17h RECEPTION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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SATURDAY 17 MAY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

9h15 Welcome and registration<\/strong>: Salle Louis-Bonnerot (English faculty library), Sorbonne Universit\u00e9, 1 rue de la Sorbonne \/ 54 rue Saint-Jacques\/ 14 rue Cujas, Paris 75005<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9h30 Panel: Varieties of Gothic Shock<\/strong> (Chair: David Duff)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sharon Choe (Copenhagen)<\/strong>: Death Songs, Gore, and the Norse-Gothic Spectacle<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eleanor Franz\u00e9n (Birkbeck)<\/strong>: \u201cA momentary horror\u201d: Mary Robinson\u2019s Vancenza<\/em> and the Shock of History<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pauline Hortolland (Besan\u00e7on)<\/strong>: \u201cA flock of vampire-bats before the glare \/ Of the tropic sun\u201d: Shelley\u2019s Poetics of Gothic Shock in The Triumph of Life<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

11h COFFEE BREAK<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

11h30 Keynote lecture: Christopher Miller (Staten Island, CUNY)<\/strong>: \u201cSurprised and not surprised\u201d: The Varieties of Astonishment in Austen\u2019s Novels<\/p>\n\n\n\n

12h30 LUNCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

14h Panel: Theatrical Shock and its Marketing<\/strong> (Chair: Marc Por\u00e9e)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deven Parker (Glasgow)<\/strong>: Shocking Bodies: Images of Empire in Romantic Playbills<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henry James Mason (QMUL)<\/strong>: Selling Shock at the Sans Pareil: The Early Shows of Jane and John Scott<\/p>\n\n\n\n

15h COFFEE BREAK<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

15h30 Panel: Shock and the Spectrum of Fiction<\/strong> (Chair: Christoph Bode)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gary Kelly (Alberta)<\/strong>: \u201cShock\u201d in\/and\/of Romantic Novelistic Discourse<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ian Balfour (York, Ontario)<\/strong>: Shock and its Absence: Terror and Temporality in Long, Short, and Medium Gothic Fictions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

16h30 END OF CONFERENCE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Introductory statement \/ Call for papers (closed)<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/strong>The \u2018shock of the new\u2019 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\u2019s disruptive powers. Keats\u2019s dictum that poetry \u2018must surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity\u2019 is one example, posing the paradox that art can be simultaneously startling and unobtrusive. Shelley\u2019s provocative account of how poetry \u2018strips the veil of familiarity from the world\u2019 to lay bare the \u2018naked and sleeping beauty\u2019 beneath is another, one of many anticipations in Romantic thought of Ezra Pound\u2019s injunction, a century later, to \u2018make it new\u2019, or of the theory of defamiliarization propounded by the Russian Formalists. A third instance can be found in Wordsworth\u2019s ambition, at least according to Coleridge, to \u2018give the charm of novelty to things of every day\u2019 in his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads <\/em>project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This disruptive, defamiliarizing power was not confined to professedly innovative art. Archaism \u2013 the \u2018shock of the old\u2019 \u2013 was an equally potent force, exemplified by the Gothic novel (or Schauerroman<\/em>, \u2018shudder-novel\u2019), in which violent subject matter and fabricated medieval pasts were used to generate readerly frissons<\/em> from emotions of fear and repugnance. The German Sturm und Drang<\/em> 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 \u2018gentle<\/em> shock of mild<\/em> surprise\u2019 in \u2018There was a boy\u2019 are an index of this recalibration). According to Christopher Miller,[1]<\/a> 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 \u2018events\u2019 and linguistic special effects. Wordsworth\u2019s \u2018Surprised by Joy\u2019 is the paradigm but such unpredictable lyric \u2018plots\u2019 were ubiquitous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the drivers in this new affective poetics was political. When Shelley in his romantic epic The Revolt of Islam <\/em>spoke of the \u2018shock and surprise\u2019 of \u2018earthly minds\u2019, 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 \u2018the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded\u2019 in the wake of 1789. Hazlitt drew similar parallels in The Spirit of the Age<\/em>, much of which is devoted to analysis of the public addiction to a literature built around sensations of shock and surprise (\u2018A poem is to resemble an exhibition of fireworks \u2026 that surprise for the moment, and leave no trace of light or warmth behind them\u2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019Rourke has shown,[2]<\/a> the idea that powerful artworks could produce responses equivalent to \u2018electric shock\u2019 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 \u2018was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning\u2019). 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 \u2018march of intellect\u2019 was anything but straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n