On the occasion of the 2019 conference of the SAES in Aix-en-Provence on 6, 7 & 8 June 2019, the Société d’études du romantisme anglais (SERA) and the Biography Society are organizing a joint workshop.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in Biographia Literaria that “it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries”. By a singular turnstile of meaning, to say of a life that it is romantic is to say that it is a life of exception, or exactly the contrary, in so far as exception itself and the yearning for it crystallizes into a trope, reproduced ad libitum. Ex-cepire : to stand out from the crowd, sortir du lot — a romantic life is by definition devoted to genius, whose hallmark is imagination conceived of as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation”. Contrarily, seen from the opposite shore of the 20th century and the deconstruction of the transcendental subject, romantic life may appear as a used-up model. And yet, Byron was Romantic precisely in this that he defined himself as antiromantic, and his Don Juan practices and ironic lightness. Keats, too, affirmed that the “poetical Character”, “distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime”, has “no identity”, as if it situated itself constantly outside itself, in an exceptional ecstasy. This workshop wishes to examine the lives of the Romantics, or some episodes of their lives, in so far as exception, thus understood, characterizes them.
Proposals, consisting of a title and an abstract of no less than 200 words, should be sent before 15 November 2018 to Caroline Bertonèche caroline.bertoneche@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr, Floriane Reviron floriane.reviron.piegay@univ-st-etienne.fr & Joanny Moulin joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr.