Session 7A: New Boots, New Bodies
Back To Program.
7A. New Boots, New Bodies
Marc Redfield (Claremont Graduate): "Harold Bloom's Body"
James Allard (Waterloo): "'Mortal, Immortal': Embodying Keats"
Paul Youngquist (Penn State): "Byron's New Boot: Poetry, Politics and the Prosthetic Body"
Back To Program.
"Mortal, Immortal': Embodying Keats"
James Allard
University of Waterloo
This paper seeks to begin to articulate what I call (after Steven Bruhm's "Gothic Body") the "Romantic Body": a "new" body that becomes the site of a peculiarly Romantic struggle between a finite corporeality, as discussed in medical discourse of the period, and an infinite imagination, as discussed by may of the poets of the period--in this case, Keats. After a brief discussion of the various types of discourses Keats employed to detail his conception of "body," I offer a reading of Keats's long poem Endymion, focusing on the pervasive but problematic representations of Endymion's body (or bodies) in and around the text.
Back To Program.
"Byron's New Boot: Poetry, Politics and the Prosthetic Body"
Paul Youngquist
Penn State
inhabited by the inhuman?
--Lyotard
Byron's republicanism arises out of this new, prosthetic body. The odd logic of the prosthesis reveals seeming unities to be artificially produced; the human body is not a natural organism but a prosthetic effect. Little wonder, then, that Byron mocks the conservative politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their ostensible humanism occludes such effects in the name Nature, Mind, and Imagination. Byron's poetry counters these ideals and the imperialism they serve in several ways. It participates in a cultural economy of prosthetics that challenges the ideal of an organic body by insisting upon the primacy of warfare in contemporary British society. It advances a politics of monstrosity grounded in material embodiment by celebrating the deeds of Napoleon, "the monster of Corsica." It exposes the ideals of medicine and literature as disciplinary fictions by dramatizing their effects upon the material body. I shall briefly address each of these moves, the first by discussing the medical treatment of war wounds, the second by examining the Napoleon's representation in nationalist broadsides, and the third by interpreting Byron's late play, The Deformed Transformed (1824), as an allegory of political dis-embodiment. In each instance Byron includes the prosthetic in his measure of humankind, raising the possibility of a new body for humankind, a prosthetic body inhabited by the inhuman.
Back To Program.