The six essays collected here suggest that Romanticism exposes us to a materialism that cannot merely be overcome and an idealism with which it is not identical. By reading beyond the texts conventionally associated with Romanticism, and by recasting the critical tendencies–from thing theory to object oriented ontology–through the poets, genres, and critics of Romanticism, these essays position Romanticism (and show how Romanticism may always have been positioned) in another relation to things as they are–or may be.
Abstract
This essay, an introduction to the collection "Romantic Materialities, or 'This is not a Thing," provides an overview of the essays included in the issue in the context of historic and recent accounts of the place of things in Romanticism, showing how a Romantic account of things helps to situate contemporary theory, from Deconstruction to Thing Theory to Object Oriented Ontology.
Abstract
“Material Excursions” teases two questions. How does the general mobility and flexibility of late capitalism, increased—if not inaugurated—by cloud computing, leave material traces? And, given romantic poetry's preoccupation with clouds, how does romantic poetry, specifically the poetry of William Wordsworth, help us to think the material traces of cloud computing and the knowledge economy differently? The essay draws from the accidental convergence of Apple’s rhetoric surrounding iCloud and Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”
Abstract
This paper explores the occasion of Wordsworth’s retrospective commentary on his poetry as recorded by Elizabeth Fenwick in notes take at Rydal Mount in 1843. Focusing on the aging poet turning the pages of the book he holds in his hand as he reads and recalls writing his poems, the argument considers touch as a form of mediation that in bringing the subject into relation with the object also brings him into relation with his own material being.
Killing What Is Already Dead: 'Original Materialism,' Translation, and Romanticism after de Man
Tom ToremansAbstract
This article addresses Paul de Man's critique of translation in the context of his later writings on aesthetic ideology and materiality. By restoring de Man's essay on Walter Benjamin to its original context of the 1983 Messenger Lectures, it elicits from these later writings a concept of translation that might be of particular relevance for a closer investigation of the interplay between translation and aesthetic theory in the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle.
Abstract
This essay considers the problem of materialism in literature from the perspective of linguistic empiricism. It takes as a its point of departure Paul de Man's treatment of linguistic materiality to argue that a specifically literary description of agency ought to take into account the event of literature as such. It then turns to Gilles Deleuze's formulation of immanence to offer a reading of a key scene in Dicken's Our Mutual Friend that illustrates how literature stages its coming-alive.
Abstract
This article examines Radcliffe's writing as a phenomenon of continuous material surfaces and folds. Radcliffe's Gothic narratives can be seen as assemblages that generate transpersonal affects and intensities. Their conservatism can be seen in how they conceive of agency as a force that arrests or works against the constant movement inherent in materiality.
Abstract
Though Karl Marx stands an irrefutable and even obligatory touchstone in most trajectories of materialism, his historical materialist analysis of capital proceeds by way of a number of formulations that subsequent Marxists would, and do, critique as idealist: conceiving labor as a differential substance that “is more than it has” and that marks the human’s distinction from animals (or, at least, from “bees” as the example goes) by virtue of its ineluctably ideational aspect; conceiving capital as “illusory, but (with) its own laws of motion for all that”; conceiving value as “in reality imp
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Romantic Materialities © 2015 by Sara Guyer is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0