Gesellschaft für englische Romantik e.V. (German Society for English Romanticism)

ROMANTICISM TODAY

12th International Symposium:

University of Tübingen , October 4 7, 2007

The persistence of Romanticism in modern culture has been widely discussed in recent years. Romantic afterlives have been traced in literary criticism and theory, in poetry and fiction from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in theatre and film, in popular culture, in politics and the sciences, and, more generally, on a fundamental cultural level revolving around questions of identity, authority and authorship in a modern or even postmodern sense. Against this background, the 2007 conference of the German Society for English Romanticism will meet the challenge of addressing the contemporaneity of Romanticism by presenting

• current readings of Romantic texts, reflecting upon present institutional and private contexts, and
• Romantic readings of current texts, reflecting upon historical continuities and differences, as well as, more generally, contributions on
• recent developments in expanding and preserving the record of Romanticism,
• the afterlives of Romantic works and artists in various media and institutions,
• the role of Romantic icons, works and strategies in cultural memory,
• the state of Romantic studies today,
• Romanticism and recent theory (ecocriticism, the cognitive turn, ...),
• Romanticism as a key to historicizing the aesthetic, and finally
• Romantic features of contemporary cultural practices in all kinds of spheres, including politics (Is there a post-colonial Romanticism? A post-national Romanticism? ...) and popular culture (How is authenticity fabricated? What kind of authority is evoked by stardom?)

We hope to welcome you to a stimulating and thought-provoking academic and an enchanting social programme in one of Germanys (or even the worlds) most Romantic locations situated, as a recently coined slogan has it, between High tech and Hegel (and Hölderlin, for that matter).

Local organizer:

Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinfandt
Englisches Seminar
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Wilhelmstr. 50 D-72074 Tübingen, Germany
christoph.reinfandt@uni-tuebingen.de