Orrin N. C. Wang - Böcker

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book AwardTechno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory.Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book AwardTechno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory.Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

The archive of Romantic studies is every day expanding far beyond its Anglo-European confines, incorporating an ever-volatile constellation of works that, like World Literature, understands itself not in any monolithically Western sense but instead as a rhizomatic, polycentric expansion of temporalities, histories, and cultures. Here, a diverse cast of expert scholars reflect on how key concepts in Romantic literary and philosophical writings - periodicity, revolution, empire and settler culture, modernity, abolition, and the problem of language - inspire World Literature's conception of its own methodologies and texts. Covering writers ranging from Lord Byron, Immanuel Kant, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Clare to Simon Bolivar, Hérard Dumesle, Hafez, Rabindranath Tagore, and Ocean Vuong, this collection showcases how the fields of Romanticism and World Literature interact in ways that create new horizons for the study of planetary culture.

The archive of Romantic studies is every day expanding far beyond its Anglo-European confines, incorporating an ever-volatile constellation of works that, like World Literature, understands itself not in any monolithically Western sense but instead as a rhizomatic, polycentric expansion of temporalities, histories, and cultures. Here, a diverse cast of expert scholars reflect on how key concepts in Romantic literary and philosophical writings - periodicity, revolution, empire and settler culture, modernity, abolition, and the problem of language - inspire World Literature's conception of its own methodologies and texts. Covering writers ranging from Lord Byron, Immanuel Kant, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Clare to Simon Bolivar, Hérard Dumesle, Hafez, Rabindranath Tagore, and Ocean Vuong, this collection showcases how the fields of Romanticism and World Literature interact in ways that create new horizons for the study of planetary culture.

This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory. Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj i ek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Bronte, and Keats. Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications for literary study.It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.

This collection provides new readings of Frankenstein from a myriad of established and burgeoning theoretical vantages including narrative theory, cognitive and affect theory, the new materialism, media theory, critical race theory, queer and gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and others. Demonstrating how the literary power of Frankenstein rests on its ability to theorize questions of mind, self, language, matter, and the socio-historic that also drive these critical approaches, this volume illustrates the ongoing intellectual richness found both in Mary Shelley’s work and contemporary ways of thinking about it.