TO: Romanticists and Friends of:

There will be FOUR panels sponsored or co-sponsored by the Division on the English Romantic Period at the upcoming MLA: MARK YOUR CALENDARS and support Romanticism!

Please do attend: in the middle of various MLA consolidation pushes (see the Restoration and late-18th C. Divisional duress), it is important demonstrate what we needs must feel: the ongoing vitality, unpredictability, and generativity of “romanticism” in all its modalities. Your colleagues hope to see you at the panels (esp the ones scheduled at awkward times, e.g. the first day of the convention) and also at the Cash Bar co-hosted with the Victorian Division: to “Nature”! “Life”! “Now”! “Meta-physics”! “Romanticism”!

all best,
Maureen N. McLane
NYU
2013 Chair of the MLA Division on the English Romantic Period

SESSIONS AND EVENTS

CASH BAR Arranged by the Division on the Victorian Period and the Division on the English Romantic Period: Saturday, 11 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., Los Angeles–Miami, Chicago Marriott

35. THE ROMANTIC NOW
Thursday, 9 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Chicago D, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Marjorie Levinson, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
1. “‘Now with Treble Soft,'” Jonathan Culler, Cornell Univ.
2. “What’s in a Name? Romanticism and Terror,” David E. Simpson, Univ. of California, Davis
3. “Taunting with Gavroche: Activist Deployments of Poetry,” Lyn Hejinian, Univ. of California, Berkeley

‘In this session, we offer and invite discussion of that temporality – the present –which cannot be spoken, only enacted, and we consider “enactment” from the perspectives of politics and poetic form.’

348. NATURE: META-PHYSICS
Friday, 10 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Chicago C, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Miranda Jane Burgess, Univ. of British Columbia
1. “String Theory and Sideways Growth: The Ecology of Romantic Poetics,” Sean Dempsey, Univ. of Arkansas, Fayetteville
2. “Miss Bates and the Nomadic Space of Emma,” Yoon-Sun Lee, Wellesley Coll.
3. “Keats and the Country Green,” Jonathan D. Mulrooney, Coll. of the Holy Cross

470. NATURE
Saturday, 11 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., Belmont, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Miranda Jane Burgess, Univ. of British Columbia
1. “Now No More,” Jacques Khalip, Brown Univ.
2. “Romantic Posthumanism: The Horror of Interspecies Community in Romantic England,” Ted Geier, Univ. of California, Davis
3. “Goya’s Scarcity,” David L. Clark, McMaster Univ.

SPECIAL SESSION with the Late-18th C Division:
235. LIFE: BEFORE AND AFTER 1800
Friday, 10 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Addison, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on Late-Eighteenth-Century English Literature and the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Kevis Goodman, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Speakers: Amanda Jo Goldstein, Cornell Univ.; Heather Keenleyside, Univ. of Chicago; Catherine Packham, Univ. of Sussex; Andrew Piper, McGill Univ.

Session Description: “Until the end of the eighteenth century . . . life does not exist: only living beings.” Our two divisions will revisit Foucault’s still influential, periodizing thesis to question its validity in the light of recent work in the field and to think about what we do and do not share.