Romanticism and Media (Theory)
Description
Romanticism and media theory have a recursive relationship. In this panel we invite contributions which explore Romantic thought in constellation with media theory and critical theories of technology. Several foundational media theorists—including Kittler, Benjamin, McLuhan, and Ong—engaged extensively with Romanticism. Romantic criticism can be seen as the critical nexus out of which media theory emerges, such that Brooke-Smith has recently positioned Romanticism as a “media theory avant la lettre” ( 2013). As such, Romanticism should be understood not merely as a literary movement, but as a self‑reflexive deployment of mediatic forms. Likewise, media theory itself returns to Romanticism to reflect on the ways subjectivity and media are co-constructed.
This panel reinterprets Romanticism through the lens of media theory, and media theory through the lens of Romanticism. We theorize Romantic tropes not merely as literary devices but as media systems. This entails understanding Romanticism’s deployment of the fragmentary encyclopedia and the interdisciplinary journal as media theoretical mechanisms that incite unbounded conflicts of the faculties, thereby destabilizing conventional epistemic structures. We see Romantic texts as active participants in the mediation, storage, and transformation of cultural material. Romantic thinkers cultivated a form of critical media practice by interweaving poetry, print culture, and their own theoretical reflections, positioning their cultural production within a richly object‑oriented, intermedial field that anticipates contemporary media‑theoretical concerns. This panel speculates on the co‑constitution of Romanticism and media theory, situating them within a shared interdisciplinary inquiry into how media condition subjectivity and shape knowledge over time.
Recent developments in technology also participate in this Romantic recursivity. Romanticism can be used to theorize developments in information technology (Streeter, 2011; Coeckelbergh, 2017). A Romantic discourse is present at the origins of digital media: from the first Apple Computer logo featuring a quote from Wordsworth’s Prelude, or Nelson naming his early vision of hypertext “Project Xanadu.” Likewise, second-order cybernetics borrows from Romanticism’s own emphasis on self-reflexive change, with Hui describing Romanticism as “a proto-cybernetics”(2019). Despite Kittler’s claim that Romanticism is foreclosed by newer media forms, it seems to return not only via new technologies, but also later media theories - perhaps even Kittler’s own.
This seminar welcomes submissions that address the topic of media (theory) and Romanticism from the following potential angles: 1) Romanticism in constellation with media theory. 2) Romantic theories of technology. 3) Histories of “Romantic technology” (how media makes recourse to Romantic ideas). 4) Media materialist readings of Romanticism.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Aubrey Grant is a doctoral candidate at Concordia University’s English Department and currently works as a Coordinator for the Centre for Expanded Poetics. His research, generously funded by CGS-SSHRC, leverages practices of rhetorical reading, deconstruction and media history to analyse the relationship between place and poetry in the Romantic Period. His previous writings can be found at Society and Space.
Speaker Bio
Max Kaisler investigates operations of atmospheric reading and indices of environmental sensitivity from the ancient to the modern world, with particular interest in the invention of the barometer and its influence on literary theory and transatlantic culture over the past four centuries. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Amherst College Center for Humanistic Inquiry and a Lecturer in the English Department.
Speaker Bio
Raj Banerjee is a PhD candidate, working primarily on Romanticism and the History of Sciences. While his work is invested in Deconstruction, History of Ideas, and Posthumanism, he is also interested in Animal Studies, Biopolitics, as well as Reading and Readership. He is a recipient of the Congress Graduate Merit Award 2024, awarded by the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences. Currently serving on the Board of Directors of ACCUTE as the President of the Graduate Student Caucus, he has been working towards ensuring best practices and transparent/inclusive advocacy for graduate students across Canadian universities and institutions.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Trained by F. Kittler and A. Ronell I am now ironically a German professor in a rather traditional department at Dickinson College. My research, though, has remained invested in media-theoretical approaches that cross over to literary studies, philosophy, histories of science, technology, and art. Recent publications include articles on Kittler’s “Incomprehensible Writings” and on the oscillation of Romantic hieroglyphs between philosophy and science.
Speaker Bio
Rowan Melling is a painter and academic from unceded Coast Salish territory. He recently received his Ph.D. in Communications from Simon Fraser University, focusing on Silicon Valley's recursive relationship with Romanticism.
Speaker Bio
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Speaker Bio
Jeremy Arnott holds a PhD from the Centre for Theory and Criticism at UWO (2022). He is an interdisciplinary theorist whose research focuses on Frankfurt School critical theory — particularly Benjamin and Adorno — as well as German Idealism. He is currently engaged in a research project on the understudied history of Canadian Idealism. Arnott is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Engineering in Society at Concordia University, where he has also taught in the Departments of Communication Studies and German. He has also instructed in the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities and the Centre for Theory and Criticism at UWO.