Romantic Individualism Research Articles

Judith N. Shklar on disobedience and obligation in a “society of strangers”

Judith N. Shklar on disobedience and obligation in a “society of strangers”

Scott, Godwin, and the Casuistry of Romantic Individualism: Politics, Legal Dysfunction, and Social Inequality

ABSTRACTThough William Godwin and Walter Scott stated politically opposite goals in their differently historical novelistic projects, they shared an underlying investment in personal judgment as a corrective provided by the implicit suggestion that the novel itself is more capable of solving certain problems than is the courtroom. This essay examines moral and legal justice in Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and in Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) alongside their authors’ involvement in real cases, from Godwin’s role in the treason trials of the 1790s to Scott’s decisions as rural magistrate in Selkirkshire. Godwin’s and Scott’s emphasis on a backward-looking, historical understanding of personal judgment over modern legal principles and procedures appears to be philosophically conservative, yet they theorize social justice as a function of a legal system properly sensitive to the individuality of the accused’s character. The casuistry of Romantic individualism underlies and ultimately resolves the tensions between Godwin’s and Scott’s approaches to justice in their novels and in their overt politics, and I track both authors’ experiments with creative jurisprudence to conclude that they were not nearly as different from one another as is generally assumed.

El Burke de América del Sur: figuraciones heroicas y operaciones políticas de Manuel Moreno en Vida y Memorias del Dr. Don Mariano Moreno

espanolEn el imaginario argentino, Mariano Moreno es el lider indiscutible del ala «jacobina» de la Revolucion de Mayo. La vinculacion con el Terror Frances fue utilizada en vida de Moreno para criticar su accionar y apartarlo de la Junta de Buenos Aires, hecho que se concreto con su partida a Londres y su muerte en altamar en 1811. Su hermano, Manuel Moreno, escribio desde la capital inglesa Vida y Memorias del Dr. Don Mariano Moreno (1812), con el fin de reivindicar su figura y de promover los vinculos economicos y politicos con Gran Bretana. La apuesta del biografo es acercar a Moreno a una postura mas moderada, atractiva al ojo britanico; por eso, le sirve la comparacion con Edmund Burke, el antijacobino por excelencia. Teniendo en cuenta esta intencion, el articulo se propone analizar las estrategias narrativas y las operaciones politicas de la biografia que convierten a Moreno en un heroe civil, cuya muerte tragica y a destiempo lo aproxima a la figura del individuo romantico. Asimismo, se indagara el modo en que Manuel Moreno busca atenuar las connotaciones negativas de las revoluciones americanas, con miras a la recepcion de un publico doble, rioplatense y britanico EnglishIn the Argentine imaginary, Mariano Moreno is the indisputable leader of the «Jacobin» wing of Argentine Revolution. This link with the French Terror was used while Moreno was alive to criticize his political measures and to remove him from the Junta of Buenos Aires, something that became a fact with his departure to London and his death at sea in 1811. His brother, Manuel Moreno, wrote from the English capital Vida y Memorias del Dr. Don Mariano Moreno (1812), in order to vindicate his figure and to promote economic and political ties with Britain. The biographer’s intention is to bring Moreno closer to a moderate posture that could be attractive to the British eye; therefore, he uses a comparison between his brother and Edmund Burke, the anti-Jacobin par excellence. By considering this intention, the article aims to analyze the biography’s narrative strategies and political operations that make of Moreno a civic hero, whose tragic and premature death brings him near to the figure of the romantic individual. In addition, it would be inquired in which ways Manuel Moreno seeks to mitigate the negative connotations of the American revolutions, with a view to the reception of River Plate and British publics

THE POETICS OF REALISM AND THAT OF SOCIALIST REALISM

When discussing the poetics of realism, we consider the fact that the indisputable dominant literary genre is the novel which, since the 18th century, in the context of romantization, turned out to be a suitable form for expressing the basic contradiction of romantization, the one between the individual and the community, where the hero is a direct expression of the archetype of the romantic individual. Later, in the nineteenth century, the novel became the main literary genre in Western literature as well, which, through the development of the psychological novel (the non-psychological, pre-psychological novel, is only a form of epic or satire) becomes an expression of the individualist vocation characterizing western civilization, when the latter has finally passed from the traditional (holistic) society to modern (individualist) society. Even in the poetics of socialist realism, the novel remains the most favorite lyrical genre (in addition to poems and lyrical poetry) being directly linked to the base paradigm of the communist regime, which was the creation of a 'New Man’.

Corto Maltese and the process of endless semiosis

ABSTRACT Corto Maltese from the eponymous series is usually regarded as one of the last great romantic heroes in comic books. This qualification is related to his persistent idealism. In various episodes, he typically ends up renouncing the material gains (e. g. a treasure he is after) in the name of friendship and solidarity. Corto Maltese consequently appears as a politically subversive figure, but in fact romantic individualism is an ambivalent ideology, which has developed together with – and not in opposition to – the dominant social-economic relations. The author of the article therefore proposes that we understand the subversive essence of the Corto Maltese series slightly differently, from the perspective of Deleuze-Guattarian schizophrenia, where stable structures of meaning are replaced by the world of unpredictable transitions. The analysis of the series points out the most important elements that could be understood as examples of endless semiosis.

The Language of Dmitriy Venevitinov’s Poetry: A Linguographic Approach

The dictionary complex of Venevitinov’s poetry language created at Kazan Federal University provides valuable materials for studying the features of his language and it is currently being prepared for publication. The dictionary complex includes quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the poet’s lexicon. This article presented the results of the study of Dmitriy Venevitinov’s poetic language obtained in the process of creating this dictionary complex. The article considered individual-author words, obsolete words, and other units referring to the vocabulary of limited use. The dictionary also provided a wide range of opportunities for a multilateral description of the texts. With the help of the frequency dictionary and concordance, the authors determined the main motives of Venevitinov’s poetry (according to Gasparov’s approach) and thereby proved the poet’s involvement in romantic individualism. The results of the study further showed the significant information potential of language reference books as well as prospects and effectiveness of their use for the description of text materials.

Emerson's Telescope: Jones Very and Romantic Individualism

Ralph Waldo Emerson described the poet Jones Very as a “telescope,” the kind of intensely focused idealist who challenges the commitments of those he encounters. Very can be compared to Herman Melville's Bartleby as a test case that reveals the limits of nineteenth-century individualism and late romanticism.

Education beyond reason and redemption: a detour through the death drive

In contrast to a world that often feels filled with madness and disillusion, education is associated with reason and redemption. Yet from a psychoanalytic perspective, such positivity in relation to education suggests a fantasmatic dimension – a refusal of the inevitable dislocations that prevent life from being harmonious and complete. In this paper, I seek to counter this relentless positivity through an engagement with the negativity of the death drive. Specifically, I provide analyses of two deathly films which can be read as responses to the ills and anxieties of modernity, Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, and Fritz Lang’s M. But whereas Dead Poets Society divides social and educational reality into good and bad, offering the former refuge in romantic individualism, M insists that society as a whole can be viewed as a destructive educational machine – a message that, though hardly comforting, might offer a starting point for rethinking education.

Messy Subjectivities: The Popular, Affective and Technical Consistencies of Early Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire Ware

This article investigates how Staffordshire figurines and dinnerware, which were popular in early nineteenth-century England and its colonies, were complicit in forging emergent social, aesthetic and subjective consciousness. Staffordshire ware was influenced by diverse technical, economic and aesthetic factors, including the circulation of print media, private property, colonialism and Romanticism. At the same time, the wares both engendered Romantic versions of subjectivity that amplified the importance of the private individual, while generating emergent sites of contestation that exceeded them. The collection of Staffordshire figurines and dinnerware was a media and technical consistency where owners could inhabit the tensions of at times conflicting social, material, affective and performative affinities or antagonisms. This discussion draws from Walter Benjamin to develop a way of thinking with how the material and media specificity of Staffordshire ware could have co-composed heterogeneous knowledges, practices and subjectivities that undermined the Romantic individual. By examining the multifaceted qualities, affects and contexts of Staffordshire ware in detail I aim to develop new terms and practices with which to activate emergent versions of historicity, corporeality and world-making.

Reluctant entrepreneurs: musicians and entrepreneurship in the 'new' music industry.

Changing labour conditions in the creative industries - with celebrations of autonomy and entrepreneurialism intertwined with increasing job insecurity, portfolio careers and short-term, project-based contracts - are often interpreted as heralding changes to employment relations more broadly. The position of musicians' labour in relation to these changes is unclear, however, given that these kinds of conditions have defined musicians' working practices over much longer periods of time (though they may have intensified due to well-documented changes to the music industry brought about by digitization and disintermediation). Musicians may thus be something of a barometer of current trends, as implied in the way that the musically derived label 'gig economy' is being used to describe the spread of precarious working conditions to broader sections of the population. This article, drawing on original qualitative research that investigated the working practices of musicians, explores one specific aspect of these conditions: whether musicians are self-consciously entrepreneurial towards their work and audience. We found that, while the musicians in our study are routinely involved in activities that could be construed as entrepreneurial, generally they were reluctant to label themselves as entrepreneurs. In part this reflected understandings of entrepreneurialism as driven by profit-seeking but it also reflected awareness that being a popular musician has always involved business and commercial dimensions. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of entrepreneurship developed by Joseph Schumpeter we highlight how the figure of the entrepreneur and the artist/musician share much in common and reflect various aspects of romantic individualism. Despite this, there are also some notable differences and we conclude that framing musicians' labour as entrepreneurial misrepresents their activities through an overemphasis on the economic dimensions of their work at the expense of the cultural.

Nie Stanisława Barańczaka. Interpretacyjne powroty

This sketch shows the evolution in the way Stanislaw Baranczak’s poem has been interpreted. Initially, these interpretations focused on the lyrical hero and role of the poetic word, revealing their roots in the Romantic tradition, and on the classic problems of romantic individualism, centered around the rights of the individual, the limits of freedom and rebellious consciousness. The author also shows how this text can be interpreted in terms of the absolute order of heroism expected of the lyrical addressee as an exchange of linguistic and somatic values. The article concludes by saying that this poem illustrates the universal idea of “intextuation” of the body (showing the legal relation to the body) presented by Michel de Certeau.

The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic

Focusing on production and dissemination of academic knowledge, this article discusses the role of higher education as it serves the neoliberal imperative. Emphasis is given to two fundamental realities that are influencing higher education today: neoliberalism and the Anthropocene. These two realities shape the crisis of the Professoriate: differentiating faculty into the romantic individual while simultaneously forcing the production of human capital in the name of neoliberalism. The production and performance of the neoliberal knowledge imperative is illustrated through the faculty performance review system. To reclaim the knowledge imperative the article argues that the refusal of work must occur. The refusal of work generates a posthuman subject, the “lazy academic” that is able to reconceptualize how the faculty can confront the neoliberal university.

Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States. William Huntting Howell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 305.

<i>Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States</i>. William Huntting Howell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 305.

Liebeslyrik und Biedermeierprosa: Bürgerliche Familienkonzepte bei Betty Paoli (1814–1894)

This article deals with different representations of bourgeois family concepts in the work of the Austrian writer Betty Paoli (pseudonym of Elisabeth Glück, 1814–1894). In her poetry Paoli follows a late Romantic individualism and anticipates the cult of the genius as well as Weltschmerz poetry, which allows her to create a passionate and occasionally exuberant female lyrical “I,” a voice rarely heard in the love poetry of the time. Although Paoli stresses individual freedom and autonomy in her poems and therefore challenges the female gender role and hierarchic relationships, her prose is characterized by an affirmative account of bourgeois family concepts and emphasizes the significance of the prevalent family narrative. An analysis of some of Paoli’s early poetry, two novellas, and her only novel demonstrates the significance of literature in the construction and undermining of the socio-historical concept of bourgeois family, a vital part of the self-image of the nineteenth-century middle class.

Salinger’s Depiction of Trauma in The Catcher in the Rye

Although J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is one of the most widely read novels in American literature , it has usually been prohibited in academic centers across the US from its publication. While many things were taboo and banned in 1950s America, Salinger talks about them frankly through his novel. From the time of its first publication, The Catcher has been seen as a depiction of trauma for many adolescents and young readers who have observed themselves opposed to the values of America. Salinger pursues a style of romantic individualism and sees society as innately corrupt. As a “trauma fiction,” The Catcher exhibits the author’s tormented relation to the war. The present study explores the root of trauma through the protagonist of the novel.

Possibility of “Literature” in Sociology

AbstractSociology can be both a science and literature. While sociology as science investigates general tendencies of social phenomena through statistical analysis and advances social policies based on the understanding of their objective causes, sociology as literature focuses on the non‐generalizable aspects of an individual event and considers the reasons for the resulting actions of human beings. In this article I examine prominent works in the sociology of literature by three representative Japanese sociologists, Sosuke Mita, Keiichi Sakuta and Shun Inoue, from the 1970s to the early 1980s. After this period, contemporary French philosophy, such as that of Foucault, introduced to Japan during the 1980s, made it clear that literature is nothing more than a social institution that produces interiority in individuals. As a result, sociology as discourse has dominated the intellectual scene in Japan ever since, eclipsing the possibility of sociology as literature, which focuses more on the romantic individual. However, I argue that an alternative possibility for sociology as literature can be found in a sociology of singularity, which grasps the concrete facticity of human activities in ordinary everyday life through reading their descriptions in works of literature.

Education and the Demand for Emancipation

This paper puts forward the hypothesis that in recent decades, pupils of schools in the western world have been given a new form of individuality. This construction has been nourished by both the demand for emancipation as it was expressed in the critical sociology of education (and pedagogy) and by the neoliberal turn in education policy. It unfolds consequences of such an alliance between romantic and neoliberal individualism, and argues that some of Simmel's concepts might fruitfully be engaged to grasp important aspects of today's educational culture. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses the construction of the new individuality in regard to educational changes in control and discipline, individually adapted education and assessment and finally academic knowledge. Primarily by using examples from the Norwegian case, the paper analyses how recent opinions on these issues can be viewed as different expressions of an educational culture promoting alienation as emancipation.

Suburbia’s Alien Reek: Contract and Relation in John Cheever’sBullet Park

Abstract:Since its establishment in the waning years of World War II, the US post-war suburb has connoted inauthenticity and conformity. But the understanding of authenticity implicit in this characterization presupposes an individualist notion of selfhood and a contractualist approach to social relations—presuppositions that, in turn, lead us to anticipate the very conformity also associated with inauthenticity. This article argues that the fiction of John Cheever adheres, not to the Romantic individualism that underlies normative views of suburbia, but to the process of identity formation described by Martin Heidegger, one that emphasizes relation to the present and factual. Accordingly, it claims that Cheever’s 1969 novel Bullet Park imagines suburbia as a prime space, not for inauthenticity and conformity, but for difference and intersubjectivity.

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

The Magic of Organizing?

The Magic of Organizing?