{"id":257,"date":"2017-12-18T11:26:20","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T16:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/?page_id=257"},"modified":"2017-12-18T11:26:20","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T16:26:20","slug":"emily-rohrbach","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/emily-rohrbach\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Rohrbach"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c<\/strong>Romanticism, Contingency, and the Counterfactual Imagination”<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Thursday, November 2, 2017 from 5.00-7.00pm. <\/strong>Boston University, College of Arts and Sciences, Room 200. 725 Commonwealth Avenue.<\/p>\n

\"Rohrbach<\/a><\/p>\n

This seminar and book discussion will focus on\u00a0Modernity\u2019s Mist<\/em>\u00a0and subsequent works-in-progress. In\u00a0Modernity\u2019s Mist<\/em>, Dr. Rohrbach\u00a0explores the Romantic imagination of contingency from the combined perspectives of intellectual history and psychoanalytic and narrative theories. Drawing on the work of David Wellbery and Christina Lupton, she understands contingency as entailing the closing and opening of possibilities; in a world of contingency, events unfold in a way that appears anything but inevitable, and there is a prevailing sense that things easily could have turned out differently. Such a situation gives rise to ideas of multiple possibilities, missed opportunities, and the\u00a0counterfactual\u00a0imagination.\u00a0Modernity\u2019s Mist<\/em>\u00a0argues that contingency in the Romantic period occurs at the intersection of, on the one hand, an urgency to define the \u201cspirit of the age\u201d and, on the other, a new sense of acceleration and unpredictable futurity. For Romantic writers, the tension between these ideas afforded a world teeming with uncertainties and possibilities.<\/p>\n

Focusing on Austen\u2019s\u00a0Emma<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Persuasion<\/em>\u00a0as well as Keats\u2019s sonnets, the seminar discussion will extend that interest in Romantic conceptions of possibility and contingency by incorporating another aspect of Romantic modernity: early nineteenth-century reading culture and the technology of the printed book. Taking cues from recent work by Christina Lupton, Andrew Piper, and Joe Rezek, among others, this seminar invites us to think about how Romantic ideas of contingency (the closing and opening of possibilities) can both shed light on and reflect the technology and culture of the codex book, which, unlike a scroll or kindle, can be opened and closed.<\/p>\n

Suggested Reading<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

David E. Wellbery, \u201cContingency,\u201d\u00a0in Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology<\/em>\u00a0(eds. Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar; Princeton UP, 1992)<\/p>\n

Emily Rohrbach,\u00a0Modernity\u2019s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation\u00a0<\/em>(Fordham, 2016)<\/p>\n

Jane Austen,\u00a0Emma<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Persuasion<\/em><\/p>\n

John Keats, \u201cOn Sitting Down to Read\u00a0King Lear<\/em>\u00a0Once Again\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0About Emily<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

After receiving her Ph.D. from Boston University and teaching at Hamilton College and Northwestern University, Dr.\u00a0Rohrbach joined the\u00a0Division of English Literature, American Studies, and Creative Writing (EAC)<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Manchester in January 2016. She has held research fellowships at the\u00a0Institut f\u00fcr die Wissenschaften vom Menschen<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Institute for Human Sciences)\u00a0in Vienna, Austria, and the\u00a0Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities<\/a>\u00a0in Evanston, Illinois. She is the author of articles on Byron, Austen, Barbauld, and Keats, and her book\u00a0Modernity\u2019s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(2016)\u00a0is\u00a0part of the new \u201cLit Z\u201d series of Fordham University Press. Along with Emily Sun, she co-edited the 50th<\/sup>\u00a0anniversary issue of\u00a0Studies in Romanticism<\/em>\u00a0on\u00a0Reading Keats, Thinking Politics<\/em><\/a>, for which she co-translated Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s essay on Keats, \u201cThe Politics of the Spider.\u201d Emily is currently principal organizer of the 2019 meeting of the\u00a0International Conference on Romanticism<\/a>, which will be hosted by the University of Manchester, to coincide with the 200-year anniversary of \u201cPeterloo.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cRomanticism, Contingency, and the Counterfactual Imagination” \u00a0Thursday, November 2, 2017 from 5.00-7.00pm. Boston University, College of Arts and Sciences, Room 200. 725 Commonwealth Avenue. This seminar and book discussion will focus on\u00a0Modernity\u2019s Mist\u00a0and subsequent works-in-progress. In\u00a0Modernity\u2019s Mist, Dr. Rohrbach\u00a0explores the Romantic imagination of contingency from the combined perspectives of intellectual history and psychoanalytic and narrative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10363,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/257"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10363"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/257\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/barc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}