Recent Publications

Description:

Romanticism: Comparative Discourses reflects how the interplay between discourses of Romanticism and discourses about Romanticism works, and suggests a critical formulation seeking not to construct a theory  of Romanticism itself but to find a Begriff that accounts for the intersecting fault lines of the movement. Among the most interesting contributions are Richard A. Nanian's "Pursuing the Plerotic Sublime," suggesting how language is at its most powerful when it fails at order, one of the great discoveries about Romantic narrative strategy; and Sonja Klocke's "The Romantic Artist on the Couch," noting that prior explanations for the Romantic trope fo the "overly sensitive artist" are at least misguided, if not entirely incorrect. Taken together, the essays in this collection show how our contemporary understanding of the movement is inevitably pluralist and substantially ideological, now defined more than ever by the marginal.

Description:

James O'Rourke traces the ethical and literary legacy of Rousseau's Confessions in a series of English-language texts in order to confront the philosophical paradigm that links ethical principles to personal choices in a coherent way. By showing how the narrators of literary biographies, in this case Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and Vladimir Nabokov, look back on their lives in such a way as to call into question the link between benevolent choices and "good" experiences, O'Rourke shows how this autobiographical strategy makes it possible both to recover traumatic material ordinarily repressed as well as to suggest a new paradigm in which there is a fundamental ethical incoherence at the center of human life. The implications of his articulation of this narrative and confessional strategy for both an understanding of Romantic self-projection and for the history of ethics are enormous, and it is not too much to say that all future moral readings of Romantic texts will have to begin with this book. For its scrupulous attention to detailed trajectory of ethical interiority and linguistic strategy, especially as it arises in Romanticism, O'Rourke's book, like Chai's, implies that a pan-European perspective on Romanticism's theoretical underpinnings is crucial. - L.H.P.