This term's first meeting of the English Faculty’s 18th-Century and Romantic Studies seminar will take place on Thursday 14th January at 5pm in the Board Room, Faculty of English. Prof Paul Hamilton (Queen Mary) will speak on the subject, '“The Experience of Everything”: Romantic Writing and Post-Kantian Philosophy'. A synopsis of his paper follows below and an advance copy is attached. Paul will both deliver the paper and speak to it more widely. All are welcome. "In English Romanticism, Coleridge and Crabb Robinson aside, there was little awareness of the way continental philosophy and literature shaped itself with ingenuity and versatility in response to Kant’s Kritiken. And at the present time, the phenomenon of post-Kantianism still awaits a comprehensive treatment of the discursive dissemination given such momentum by its treatment of the aesthetic. In this paper I make a Hegelian wager, though, that philosophically unselfconscious English writing was still, arguably, reflective of its epoch and configured itself accordingly. This premise allows me to hazard some Anglo-German comparisons directed by three main reactions to Kant which I will fill out in more detail. However, for me this is an opportunity to ask the question of whether or not that post-Kantian variety does indeed ingeniously transform itself into such very different kinds of writing of the period (rather than, say, being arrested in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s monolithic ‘literary absolute’). In this I believe my paper does chime with a discontent with inherited views of the aesthetic, which ‘turn art into an object for philosophy’. These range from Alain Badiou’s proposal of an ‘inaesthetic’ to the view associated with Simon Jarvis and others, deriving from Adorno, that poetry has its own philosophical song to sing and can think paratactically, independent of the constraints of philosophy’s propositional idiom. But post-Kantians had already argued that the experience of feeling unconditioned by conceptual or ethical coherence could be phenomenologically caught. Or else they staged expressive dilemmas as apparently different as Wordsworth’s Godwin crisis (The Borderers) and Kleist’s Kant-Krise. in which the persistently unassimilable status of Kant’s unconditional ground of everything becomes what writing is about." Those wishing to undertake some exploratory reading before the seminar may wish to consult the handout (also attached here) and pursue some of the reading cited there. Paul Hamilton is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. His Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism is due out this year. His most recent monograph was Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (Oxford: 2013). He is currently still doing comparative work on European Romanticism - primarily French, Italian(?), German and English. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents
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