Reports from the Stuart Curran Symposium 2023 “Romantic Futures”
The 2023 Curran Symposim was held on Saturday, October 28, 2023, 9:15AM-6:00PM, Palladium Hall, NYU and co-organized by Bakary Diaby, Lennie Hanson, and Karen Swann. This event was sponsored by the K-SAA, with additional funds from the Byron Society of America and the Fordham Romanticism Group. See the full program here.
On the Blog today we present three snapshots from forthcoming longer reports about the exciting work discussed at our most recent symposium. Thank you to all our contributors, the organizers, and everyone who supports the K-SAA – remember you can become a member or donate here.
Photos by Kaila Rose
Report I: Kaila Rose on “Approaching the Future”, “A conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva”, and “Collaborating on the Future”
Karen Swann introduced the opening panel: "Approaching the Future." Asked to reflect on Romanticism more broadly by pairing concerns of the Romantic Era with a more specific interest outside of our usual catalogue of contributors, the panel included papers from some of our field's future itself: the early career researchers Joseph Albernaz, Kristina Huang, and Dianna Little. This panel was followed by was a conversation between Denise Ferreira da Silva (NYU), author of Toward Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt, and her interlocutor, Samika Khalil (UC Irvine), a scholar of racial slavery in the Arab world as well as Arab subject-formation and its convergences with constructions of race.
Their conversation began with a necessarily somber tone, as they opened by addressing the current state of the world that calls into question the possibility of having a conversation at all. As there is no language in existence through which such horrors can truly be discussed, they reframed their entire conversation through the language of "if we could" or "if we were able to" have this conversation "it would have gone something like this." Their use of the subjunctive and the conditional enacted the limits of language in a moving way. Sadly, their presentation had to be cut short when they arrived at a quote from a Palestinian reporter. After the report was read, the computers were closed. The speakers' acknowledgement of the unspeakable ensued in a respectful silence.
Then came news of the forthcoming editions:
The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature
The Cambridge Companion to 18th Century Literature and Race
The Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era
Emily Sun presented the Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature, which she is editing with Orrin Wang. To give a full view of the significance of our field in the world, Sun and Wang have contributors from around the world with diverse and unique expertise. They are showing "a global archive," as Sun says, that will serve as a guide and research book for future studies and interest.
Left to right: Emily Sun, Eugenia Zuroski, Arif Camoglu, Omar F. Miranda, Kate Singer, and Gaura Narayan
Eugenia Zuroski gave a summary of her current project: the new Cambridge Companion to 18th Century Literature and Race. This Companion is in the very early stages. Zuroski discussed the increased interest in Indigeneity, "Blackness," "Brownness," and "new bodies of poetic figure and structure" in the 18th century. In order to bring this era into our conversations today, Zuroski says that "we need to experience time differently." This edition will provide an overview of how racial writings shifted with practices to critically unsettle past assumptions and representations of writing at the time. The Companion will cluster 5-6 short essays on how race is taken up in a specific cultural context. Zuroski is an advocate of the "flash-essay"; this style of essay writing acts as a pushback at the traditional essays, which remain in the domain of Western university structures. The flash essay––a "punchy argument or thought"––begins a conversation that encourages readers to continue thinking and writing about the topics themselves. "A weaver of intellectual threads," as Zuroski puts it, that haven't yet been able to be studied or be approached in this way.
The Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era, edited by Arif Camoglu, Omar F. Miranda, Gaura Narayan, and Kate Singer, will foreground collaboration to discuss Romantic pasts, presents, and futures. Miranda gave an overview of the edition, which is prioritizing the Global South and working on a thematic approach to building the table of contents, rather than the traditionally linear one that groups works in a temporal fashion. Camoglu called attention to the habit of conflating the "Global" with the Anglophone and the need to move beyond through discussing work from archives located in the non-Anglophone world. Many of their contributors are translating works that have never been translated before. Singer discussed the question of what it means to put together a volume for teaching that both preserves and is accessible in a new way.
A roundtable followed where Miranda noted the excitement in our field as the many overlaps in projects are giving way to "editions upending the power structures of dominance." Traditional Romantic poets are still there, but only to foreground the work of other writers many have not heard of yet. Their discussion also addressed how the demands of the institution can get in the way of pedagogical relationships and structures, Zuroski's attention to building "the relationship of trust" between the editor and writers, acknowledging the invisible labor of contributors who are doing their own translations, and how we are beginning to represent a "Global Archive" and develop a new vocabulary for how we talk about revolution, abolition, and resistance.
Forthcoming on the K-SAA Blog in 2024: Kaila’s full report, including details of the President’s opening address and more on the first panel “Approaching the Future,” along with notes from the workshops and concluding sessions.
Report II: Shruti Jain & Kaushik Tekur on the “Classes” workshop.
The roundtable on editing was followed by three concurrent workshops: commons, classes, and publics. The classes workshop was moderated by Karen Swann and the conversation began with introductory remarks by Rosa Elizabeth Schneider, Shelley AJ Jones, Shruti Jain, and Kaushik Tekur.
Syllabi, course material, and sample assignments of the classes designed and taught by these instructors were circulated among all participants beforehand. Jain’s and Tekur’s courses titled ‘British Women Write the World’ and ‘Policing and Culture’ respectively, place familiar Romantic-era texts in contexts that extend beyond the period’s traditionally defined temporal bounds and/or beyond the geographical space of European Romanticism. Schneider teaches Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to high school students in a course in which it is the only Romantic text. Jones’s course teaches Romantic literature in an asynchronous online course to a student population that is “non-traditional” (including many older, working adults). These diverse courses and teaching scenarios opened up room for reimagining pedagogy and Romanticism itself in newer contexts.
With the well-recognized need to widen the canon beyond the Big Six, questions about what teaching within the field would look like then occupied the participants…
Forthcoming on the K-SAA Blog in 2024: Shruti and Kaushik’s full report, including further important discussions on looking beyond the Big Six, the ‘crisis of the Humanities’, reading loads, use of anthologies, the importance of understanding Global Romanticism, and the potential for new collaborative, open-archive projects.
Report III: Shellie Audsley on the “Commons” workshop.
During the afternoon hybrid session, moderated by Bakary Diaby, we reflected on our public/pedagogical outreach initiative –“Commonplacing”– and brainstormed ideas for developing the historic and changing practices of commonplacing into resources for pedagogy and learning. In light of the challenges in and of the classroom, as well as the critical relevance of commonplacing in Romanticism, we feel the necessity of forging an accessible common ground which will enable learners and readers of different levels to understand the continued relevance of our subject(s).
Beyond its textual productions, the notions of epistemological uncertainty espoused in Romanticism remains central to the broader study of literature and culture as a discipline. Likewise, Romanticism’s history as a multimedia phenomenon opens up avenues into the fascinating material culture of the long nineteenth century as well as nascent ideas of media networks. With a view to broaden appreciation for Romantic studies for the future and cultivate key skills in the next generation of learners, we have envisioned a series of developments in our outreach effort which will help—through the creation of teaching resources and learning tools—visualize the breadth of Romantic legacy in media forms beyond the printed texts.
Forthcoming on the K-SAA Blog in 2024: Shellie’s full report, highlighting reoccurring problems surrounding Romanticism and the classroom. Participants asked: how can we collaborate with poets and artists? How do we lessen the distance between Romanticism and the modern reader? and more, in an engaging and fruitful discussion.
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