Coinciding with the Centennial of the world War I Armistice, and taking place in an iconic world war heritage site, this conference explores the heritage of romanticism in the war-torn long twentieth century, as well as its persistent echoes in the age of the War on Terror.
REGISTRATION
Registration is possible here: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/raww/registration
PROGRAM
SUNDAY, 11 NOVEMBER
20:00 Literary Event: War Porn / The People Healer
Roy Scranton and Koen Peeters read from their recent novels and engage in conversation with Ortwin de Graef
21:30 Drinks
MONDAY, 12 NOVEMBER
08:30-09:00 Registration
09:00-09:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks
09:30-11:00 Keynote Lecture 1: Paul K. Saint-Amour (University of Pennsylvania)
Fossil Poetics of the Somme
11:00-11:30 Coffee
11:30-13:00 Session 1: In the Mood for War (convened by Jan Mieszkowski [Reed College])
Anders Engberg-Pedersen (University of Southern Denmark)
Clausewitz, Céline, and the Atmospheres of War
Lily Gurton-Wachter (Smith College)
“The Thud of Something Falling” (in Charlotte Smith and Virginia Woolf)
Jan Mieszkowski (Reed College)
Revolutionary Grammars, Military Moods
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:30 Session 2: Techno-Planetarity and Drone Warfare (convened by Debjani Ganguly [University of Virginia])
Debjani Ganguly (University of Virginia)
Drone Vision and Bio-Techno Terror
Beryl Pong (University of Sheffield)
“Its whirring, whirring, whirring, whirring”: The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare, from Below
Roy Scranton (University of Notre Dame)
The Bomber Lyric and Drone Poetics
15:30-16:00 Coffee
16:00-17:30 Session 3A: Undoing the Romantic Aura of War: Ubiquitous Violence/ Apocalypse Now
Ron Ben Tovim (Ben-Gurion University):
David Jones and Romanticism
Cynthia Dretel (Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar)
Echoes of War: Polish Romanticism in the Stutthoff Concentration Camp Szopka
Thomas Knowles (Birmingham City University)
“World War Three”: J.G. Ballard and War Writing
Session 3B: Romanticizing Armies, or, Pride and Propaganda
Christophe Declercq (University of Leuven, UCL)
The Strange Case of Romantic Patriotism, Patriotist Propaganda and Post-Romantic Responses to Belgian Refugees in Britain During the First World War
Guy Woodward (Durham University)
Balkan Romanticism in Britain During the Second World War
Ana Ashraf (University of Leuven)
The Returning Soldier and the Female Gaze
17:30-18:00 Coffee
18:00-19:30 Geoffrey Hartman Memorial Lecture: Marc Redfield (Brown University)
Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan
19:30-20:30 Wine Reception
TUESDAY, 13 NOVEMBER
09:00-10:00 Session 4A: Insidious Presence: War as Modernist Mind-Fever
Nataša Tučev (Univesity of Niš)
The Mirror of Nature is Broken”: The Great War and Romanticism in To the Lighthouse
Leonie Achtnich (Freie Universität Berlin)
“An Inexplicable Fever”: Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
Session 4B: Control and Save: Contemporary War and the Legacy of Romanticism
Carmen Casaliggi (Cardiff Metropolitan University)
Romantic Writing, Contemporary Europe, and the War on Terror: Smith, Staël, and Shelley
David Garcia (Carthage College)
To Preserve and Revise: The Cornell Wordsworth after the Wars
10:00-10:30 Coffee
10:30-12:00 Session 5: The Romantic Margins of War: Veterancy, Lateness, Outsiders
Neil Ramsey (University of New South Wales)
The Veteran and the Collapse of Romance: History, Life and Security in Scott’s The Antiquary
Brecht de Groote (University of Leuven)
None of them Capable of Love: Peace without Poetry in Late and Post-Romanticism
Laura Cernat (University of Leuven)
Equal Outsiders: Romance, Romanticism, and Coleridge’s Political Thought in Woolf’s Pacifist-Feminist Essays
12:00- 13:00 Lunch
13:00-14:30 Session 6: New Masculinities in Postwar Literature and Film: From Romantic Traditions of Heroism to Re-Education (convened by Petra Rau [University of East Anglia])
Gill Plain (University of St Andrews)
Reconceptualising Risk: Masculinity and Adventure after World War Two
Ina Habermann (University of Basel)
“Quietly Walling Myself In”: Precarious Masculinities in J.B. Priestley’s Post-War Fiction
Maria Fritsche (University of Trondheim)
“A Fine Romance?” Landscape, War Time Guilt, and Gender in Postwar Austrian Cinema
14:30-15:00 Coffee
15:00-16:30 Session 7: Pursuing Peace/ Pursued by War
Frederik Van Dam (Radboud University Nijmegen)
From Error to Terror: W.H. Auden and the Diplomatic Sonnet
Andrea Haslanger (University of Sussex)
Impossible Peace
Györgi Fogarasi (University of Szeged)
On Slopes: Danger, Disguise, and the Fading Outlines of War
16:30-17:00 Coffee
17:00-18:30 Keynote Lecture 2: Santanu Das (King’s College London)
Fugitive Fragments: The Great War and Colonial Poetics
20:00-22:30 Conference Dinner at Gloria Restaurant (Arnould Nobelstraat 50)
The conference is a joint initiative of University of Leuven’s Department of Literature and the Institute for Jewish Studies at Antwerp University. The organizers are Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp), Ortwin de Graef (KU Leuven), Tom Toremans (KU Leuven), Pieter Vermeulen (KU Leuven), and the doctoral students Ana Ashraf (KU Leuven), Laura Cernat (KU Leuven), and Kahn Faassen (KU Leuven).