World Literatures and Comparative Studies
/ German
Larry Peer (Brigham Young University - Provo)
larr@****.com (Log-in to reveal)
Romanticism is a cross-linguistic and multi-disciplinary system of cultural and artistic norms with canonical significance for the modern world. The Continental Romanticism session explores topics from any language or national tradition, as well as from any discipline, that have to do with Romanticism in Europe or with European connections.
Critical approaches to anything, especially Romanticism, often suffer from kinds of absolutism and relativism. An approach that disdains or ignores interrelations between cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary sources and influences will tend to submit concepts or conceptual frameworks to a dogmatic and authoritarian set of preconceptions, where even the use of terms may be crabbed or garbled. Opposite this absolutism is the referral of Romanticism exclusively to a particular national, political, linguistic, or disciplinary lens with an explicit and implicit selection of biases that ignore the dynamic continuance of the movement and that negate a deeper understanding of the dimension of its significance. This session provides a place where studies of individual poets, problems, promises, and pitfalls within Romanticism's scope of languages and disciplines may be presented.