Romanticism and Contemporary Culture

On June 17, 2000, the Romantic Circles MOO hosted a conference called "Romanticism and Contemporary Culture." The papers appearing in this issue by Ron Broglio, Jay Clayton, Atara Stein, and Ted Underwood were first "delivered" at that conference. That is, shorter versions of these essays were posted on a web site, and then approximately ten people met in the MOO at a specific time to discuss them. Our discussion was extensive. We discussed how copyright law affects readings of contemporary cultural artifacts (it is extraordinarily expensive to quote contemporary musical lyrics); we thought about how methods for raising and lowering cultural capital differ between the Romantic era and our own time. The essays themselves are primarily about teaching Romanticism in the context of popular culture. During our virtual discussion, Atara coined the term "fan/academic" to describe similarities between the kinds of emotional cathexes fixating students to popular culture and academics to Romantic studies. In various ways, each one of these essays offers a plan for capitalizing on students' emotional investments in contemporary cultural artifacts as a way of bringing them to understand the past and then using that understanding to gain critical insight into the present.