Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism

Jacques Khalip, Forest Pyle, Jacques Khalip, Forest Pyle

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780823271047
  9780823271030
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823271054
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Literature

Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism takes its title and point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, which puts both "contemporary" and "romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. Featuring fascinating and diverse contributions by an international roster of distinguished scholars working in and out of romanticism—from deconstruction to new historicism, from queer theory to postcolonial studies, from visual culture to biopolitics—this volume makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin's conception of history: These critics "grasp the constellation" into which our "own era has formed with a definite earlier one." Each of these essays approaches romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own time: What is the unlived of a contemporary romanticism? What has romanticism's singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is romanticism's contemporary "redemption value" for painting and politics, philosophy and film?

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• The History of Missed Opportunities
• The Pathology of the Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life
• Painting Theory
• Here There Is No After (Richter’s History)
• Goya’s Scarcity
• The Tone of Praise
• Endymion
• Dancing in the Dark with Shelley
• The Pastoral Stain
• The Walter Scott Experience
• Free Indirect Filmmaking
• Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post-Romantic Literature
• Technomagism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Here, Now
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index