CORAL hiatus

The Colloquium on Romanticism & the Long Eighteenth Century is entering a period of suspension. We want to acknowledge our wonderful speakers and Carleton University's Department of English for its support as we wrap things up.

We wish everyone a wonderful academic year and look forward to future CORAL events,

Emma and Alex

Fielding’s Farcical Accidents

CORAL is delighted to announce 'Fielding's Farcical Accidents,' 

with Dr. Rebecca Tierney-Hynes (University of Waterloo), 

on April 16th, at 2 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower 1811).

Dr. Tierney-Hynes is the author of Novel Minds, published by Palgrave Macmillan:

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/novel-minds-rebecca-tierneyhynes/?K=9780230369375  

"Clearing A Five-Bar Gate," by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, 1805
Courtesy of the British Museum.

Dr. Tierney-Hynes has been kind enough to give us a sneak preview!

When Henry Fielding seeks to explain and justify laughter in his Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men(1743), he begins with an accident: the risible object slips and falls in the dirt. This classic banana-peel scenario is followed by an examination of the affective process experienced by the spectator. The unfortunate slip cues the spectator’s involuntary laughter, a “convulsive Extasy.” But if the accident should happen to have a serious and painful outcome, the spectator’s laughter ought to “begin to change itself into Compassion.” Fielding explains that the spectator’s accidental response is fundamentally unconnected with his or her moral essence: laughter is “one of those first … spontaneous Motions of the Soul, which few … attend to, and none can prevent; so it doth not properly constitute the Character” (Miscellanies, ed. Amory, II.160). The farcical accident opens a momentary breach between the emotional essence, the “Good-Nature” of the spectator, and his convulsive physical response.

            To what extent does the form of farce marry accidents in the sense of errors, slips, tumbles, “Kicks in the B---ch, &c. … and infinite other Dexterities, too tedious to particularize” (II.161), to accidents – inessential parts – of the self? And what might the one have to do with the other? Fielding insists, in the same essay, that “the Passions of Men do commonly imprint sufficient Marks on the Countenance” (II.157) to enable the discerning viewer to read a person’s character on his face. The physiological signs of temperament are here simply a code for the essence of a person, a view that is very much in line with established seventeenth- and eighteenth-century models of emotion. This paper will therefore ask: What is it about sudden events, unexpected turns, and novel circumstances that seem to invoke an affective system in which body becomes accidental to character, where elsewhere the two are the same? And is it possible that there exists a peculiar and unexpected resonance between accidents that provoke laughter and laughter as a momentary accident of the temper?

‘The Jew that Shakespeare Drew’: Unintended Consequences of Representation and the Call for Authorial Responsibility in Depictions of Jews during the Long Eighteenth-Century

The Jew Beauties, Woodcut, 1806, courtesy of Laurie & Whittle, 53, Fleet Street, London

We are pleased to announce that PhD Candidate (University of Ottawa) Aaron Kaiserman will be the next speaker in the CORAL series. On October 24 at 11 am, Aaron will be presenting his paper "'The Jew that Shakespeare Drew’: Unintended Consequences of Representation and the Call for Authorial Responsibility in Depictions of Jews during the Long Eighteenth-Century.'"

Aaron's talk will demonstrate how self-conscious efforts to rehabilitate Jews in fiction during the eighteenth century and the Romantic period provide insight into how the responsibilities of authorship were being reinterpreted at the time. To instruct and delight alone seemed no longer enough when a novelist or playwright could be accused (sometimes by him or herself) of unintentionally promoting harmful ideas about the Jewish people through thoughtless caricatures, and recognition of the problem of stereotyping in turn forced British authors to think more carefully about interfaith and intercultural politics in their work

 

Join us on October 24th at 11 am in Dunton Tower, Room 1811 for what is sure to be an enlightening talk! Vegetarian snacks and refreshments will be served.

This talk will be co-sponsored by the English Department (http://www.carleton.ca/english/) and by the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies (http://carleton.ca/jewishstudies/).  Thanks to their joint generosity, expect some opulent refreshments!

The Afterlives of Percy Shelley, Schoolboy Rebel

With Dr. James Brooke-Smith (University of Ottawa), on Wednesday, April 16th, at 2.30 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower Rm. 1811). 

This talk comes out of James's very fresh research on Percy Shelley's time at Eton and his subsequent reception within the Victorian and Edwardian public schools. It explores Shelley's afterlife as an icon of aesthetic rebellion within the stultifying world of the school. 

James's research also encompasses the classical curriculum and its different instantiations in the nineteenth-century schoolroom and even in nonsense verse, and the clever ways that schoolboys dodged disciplinary measures. 



"The Schoolmaster's Return," 1825, courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.

Refreshments will be served, and they will be much nicer than 18th-c boarding-school food.
PS - this depicts James's subject, and not (we hope) the CORAL audience!

Samuel Johnson and Poetic Labour

"Thou art a Retailer of Phrases; And dost deal in Remnants of Remnants, Like a maker of Pincushions." Unknown artist, 1803, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. 

The Colloquium on Romanticism and the Long Eighteenth Century is delighted to announce its first return speaker - Prof. Frans De Bruyn (University of Ottawa). 

Prof. De Bruyn will give a talk at 2.30pm, on Friday, February the 28th, in the refurbished Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower 1811) on an intriguing subject - Dr. Johnson and Poetic Labour.  Sumptuous refreshments will be served.

Read a sneak preview here!

“In my talk, I propose to show how Johnson conceives of the art of writing in Virgilian georgic terms, as labour, and how this conception of writing as labour culminates in a characteristically eighteenth-century critical ideal: an aesthetic of laboured style and form. This view of literary creativity as a function primarily of work rather than the unbidden promptings of genius, as much a matter of perspiration as inspiration, makes a significant contrast, as I will show, with prevailing conceptions of the creative act in the historical periods preceding and following the eighteenth century.”

Eighteenth-Century Prints in France and England

CORAL is delighted to announce a talk by Prof. Stéphane Roy, on Thursday, Mar. 21^st, at 2 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (DT 1811). 

One of our co-organizers, Emma, has had the pleasure of hearing a version of this talk, and it was sensational!  Prof. Roy takes a transnational approach, comparing the prestige and influence of French and English prints at different periods of the eighteenth century, and looks at mixed printmaking techniques as performance, spectacle, and narrative.  The way that prints told stories – both as illustrations of novels and as freestanding cycles of images – is really gripping.

Hogarth self-portrait courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London



Prof. Roy's research has included printmaking, propaganda, and the French Revolution, and has branched into book history and travel illustration.  He has served as curator at the Yale Center for British Art and at the Portrait Gallery of Canada.

Refreshments will be served!

Alexander Grammatikos and Emma Peacocke cordially welcome you on behalf of CORAL and the English Department.

A CORAL Double-Header

On April 11, 2012, at 1 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower 1811), CORAL will be presenting two thrilling speakers on closely related topics.



Mary Wollstonecraft's portrait projected onto the Houses of Parliament in London, courtesy of maryonthegreen.org



Dr. Julie Murray (Carleton University) will be discussing female biography, focusing on literary women of the 1790s and drawing on Agamben's ideas of 'bare life.'

Dr. April London (University of Ottawa) will be discussing Sarah Fielding and touch on the careers of Lucy Aikin and Elizabeth Hamilton.

 



Benjamin West's 'Agrippina', courtesy of the Yale Art Gallery.
Elizabeth Hamilton wrote a life of Agrippina.

 Several people who attended CSECS 2011 said they wished they could have heard April and Julie together - this will be your chance!  Anyone interested in literary biography, novel theory, feminist theory, or politics should come out for this colloquium.

Refreshments will be served.