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Romanticism and Speculative Realism PDF

299 Pages·2019·8.508 MB·English
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i Romanticism and Speculative Realism ii ii i Romanticism and Speculative Realism Edited by Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy iv BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Chris Washington, Anne C. McCarthy, and Contributors, 2019 Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design by Emma J. Hardy Cover images © Rucksack Magazine / Unsplash.com; Nathan Anderson / Unsplash.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3638-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3640-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-3639-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. v Contents List of Figures vii Introduction: Literature and philosophy in the world without us Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy 1 1 Of Meillassoux’s contingencies and Scott’s plots: Rethinking probability in a world of unreason Evan Gottlieb 21 2 Affect and air: The speculative spirit of the age Michele Speitz 37 3 Feeling as hyperobject in Wordsworth’s The Prelude Joel Faflak 57 4 Blank oblivion, condemned life: John Clare’s “Obscurity” David Collings 75 5 Speculative enthusiasm: William Blake’s Jerusalem and Quentin Meillassoux’s divine ethics Allison Dushane 93 6 Surfing the crimson wave: Romantic new materialisms and speculative feminisms Kate Singer 111 7 Romantic postapocalyptic politics: Reveries of Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux in a world without us Chris Washington 133 8 Astral guts: The nemocentric self in Byron and Brassier Aaron Ottinger 157 9 A perilous change of correspondence: Romanticism after [Nature] Mary Jacobus 175 10 Plasticity, poetry, and the end of art: Malabou, Hegel, Keats Greg Ellermann 197 11 Poe’s Black Cat Graham Harman 217 12 Objects taken for wonders in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative Alexander Dick 237 13 An object-oriented media studies: The case of romantic cookery books Brian Rejack 257 Notes on Contributors 281 Index 285 vi vi i Figures 12.1 J. M. W. Turner, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island of St Vincent, at Midnight 246 13.1 Full-plate illustrations from the 1836 edition of Marie Antonin Carême’s French Cookery 264 13.2 From the sixth edition of Louis Eustache Ude’s The French Cook 265 13.3 From Ude’s The French Cook, published by John Ebers, 1819. The British Library 266 13.4 A table setting from Domestic Economy, and Cookery, For Rich and Poor (1827) 267 13.5 Keats’s poem as first published in The Examiner, March 16, 1817 268 13.6 The frontispiece and title page to Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery 271 13.7 Annotations from Mary Bingham (at bottom, “Mary Bing ham Her Book”) in the second edition of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery (1747) 274 viii 1 Introduction: Literature and philosophy in the world without us Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy The essays in this collection map the territory produced by the conjunction of the two terms in the title. Although this is not the first publication to identify important resonances between the literature and philosophy of the romantic era and the paradigms advanced under the banner of speculative realist philosophy, the “and” in our title signifies something at once more bold and more complex: the necessity of romanticism for understanding the world revealed by speculative realism; the horizons opened up for both romanticism and speculative realism when they are read with each other; and the possibility that perhaps they are only foils for one another, critiques that rebuff and curtail as much as they advance. If speculative realism provides a conceptual framework for reexamining anew the “romantic ideology” stereotyped as anti-realist and preoccupied by the human mind, then romanticism enables a radical rereading of speculative realism that reminds it of the aesthetic, the political, and the ethical dimensions that, in some accounts, it supposedly flees. Romanticism and Speculative Realism thus aims to provide substantially new readings of romantic-era texts that can emerge only from an engagement with speculative realism when the singularity and multiplicity of both the romantic subject and object are taken into focus. The “and” of this volume’s title, then, does not strictly conjoin the terms but rather lets them communicate their intimacies and extimacies as they discover them in an “unremitting interchange,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley might describe it. To put it another way, this is a collection that is speculative in the sense that it is determined to speculate about its own reasons for being and romantic in that it acknowledges that it is perhaps romantically destined to fall short of realizing any ambitions it harbors. Romanticism has long been characterized as preoccupied with anthropocentricism, the human subject, and their ability to transcend the material world around them, whereas speculative realism is apparently at odds with such a preoccupation. Speculative realist thought took shape in the first decade of the twenty-first century, against the background of what three of its main thinkers, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, describe as “looming ecological catastrophe, the increasing infiltration of technology into the everyday world (including our own bodies),” and

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