Romanticism and Speculative Realism

299 Pages·2019·8.508 MB·English

by  Chris Washington, Anne C. McCarthy

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism
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Romanticism and Speculative

Realism
Edited by
Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy
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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in the United States of America 2019
Copyright © Chris Washington, Anne C. McCarthy, and Contributors, 2019
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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
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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
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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