Romanticism After Auschwitz reveals how one of the most insistently anti-romantic discourses, post-Holocaust testimony, remains romantic, and proceeds to show how this insight compels a thorough rethinking of romanticism.

Romanticism After Auschwitz reveals how post-Holocaust testimony remains romantic, and shows why romanticism must therefore be rethought. The book argues that what literary historians have traditionally called "romanticism," and characterized as a literary movement stretching roughly between 1785 and 1832, should be redescribed in light of two circumstances. The first is the specific inadequacy of literary-historical models before "romantic" works. The second is the particular function that these unsettling aspects of "romantic" works have after Auschwitz. The book demonstrates that certain figures (of speech, writing, and argument) central to normative accounts of "romanticism," serve in their most radical--most genuinely "romantic"--form as vehicles for posing a conception of life (and death) revealed in the camps. In these pages, Agamben meets Wordsworth, Shakespeare meets Celan, film meets lyric poetry, survivors' accounts meet fiction, de Man encounters Nancy. The book offers new readings of highly canonical works--Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Alain Resnais's Night and Fog--and introduces unfamiliar texts. It elaborates a fascinating account of the rhetoric of ethical dispositions and gives its readers an attentive, moving way of understanding the condition of human survival after the Holocaust.

This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture. The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.

Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique explores cinema in relation to the critical tradition in modern philosophy and its heritage in Romantic aesthetics. Synthesising a variety of discursive fields and traditions - including Early German Romanticism, Frankfurt School critical theory and the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière - Film, Negation and Freedom outlines a radical new approach to film by re-examining the work of Arthur Penn and Lindsay Anderson. A distinction between Light and Dark Romanticism is introduced as a means of interpreting cinema's relationship with capitalism, as well as dualistic concepts such as stillness and motion, passivity and activity, pain and pleasure. Film, Negation and Freedom revitalises our understanding of modern audio-visual media, as well as the aesthetic, philosophical and political conditions of Romantic subjectivity, artistic practice and spectatorship.

This 141st volume of Yale French Studies carefully examines the life and work of Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018) following his 1985 masterpiece, Shoah This volume of Yale French Studies charts the different paths Lanzmann took after the release of Shoah in 1985. These paths are explored through a consideration of his late films--Tsahal (1994), A Visitor from the Living (1997), Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001), Light and Shadows (2008), The Karski Report (2010), The Last of the Unjust (2013), Napalm (2017), and Four Sisters (2018)--and of his memoir, The Patagonian Hare. The volume also includes an English translation of his last major interview, "Self-Portrait at Ninety." The original essays collected here show that Lanzmann's late films and writing stand as something more than mere footnotes to his 1985 masterpiece. Continuing to wrestle with questions of cinematic transmission and the relationship among film, history, and testimony, they confront anew and in a variety of approaches the challenge of representing the Holocaust, and of living in its aftermath.

The nineteenth century was a time of extraordinary attunement to the unspoken, the elusively present, and the subtly haunting. Quiet Testimony finds in such attunement a valuable rethinking of what it means to encounter the truth. It argues that four key writers—Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and Henry James—open up the domain of the witness by articulating quietude’s claim on the clamoring world. The premise of quiet testimony responds to urgent questions in critical theory and human rights. Emerson is brought into conversation with Levinas, and Douglass is considered alongside Agamben. Yet the book is steeped in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, in which speech and meaning might exceed the bounds of the recognized human subject. In this context, Melville’s characters could read the weather, and James’s could spend an evening with dead companions. By following the path by which ostensibly unremarkable entities come to voice, Quiet Testimony suggests new configurations for ethics, politics, and the literary.

Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. Lyric poetry is especially concerned with things and their relationship to thought, sense, and understanding. In Romantic Things, Mary Jacobus explores the world of objects and phenomena in nature as expressed in Romantic poetry alongside the theme of sentience and sensory deprivation in literature and art. Jacobus discusses objects and attributes that test our perceptions and preoccupy both Romantic poetry and modern philosophy. John Clare, John Constable, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Gerhard Richter make appearances around the central figure of William Wordsworth as Jacobus explores trees, rocks, clouds, breath, sleep, deafness, and blindness in their work. While she thinks through these things, she is assisted by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Helping us think more deeply about things that are at once visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling, Romantic Things opens our eyes to what has been previously overlooked in lyric and Romantic poetry.

Until now, there has been little scholarly attention given to the ways in which Eastern European Holocaust fiction can contribute to current debates about transnational and transgenerational memory. Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literary narratives about the Holocaust offer a particularly interesting case because time and again Holocaust memory is represented as intersecting with other stories of extreme violence: with the suffering of the non-Jewish South-Slav population during the Second World War, with the fate of victims of Stalinist terror, and with the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. This book examines the emergence and transformations of Holocaust memory in the socialist Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav eras. It discusses literary texts about the Holocaust by Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav writers, situating their oeuvre in the historical and discursive context in which it emerged and paying attention to its reception at the time. The book shows how in the writing of different generational groups (the survivor generation, the 1.5, and the second and third generations), the Holocaust is a motif for understanding the nature of extreme violence, locally and globally. The book offers comparative studies of several authors as well as readings of the work of individual writers. It uncovers forgotten authors and discusses internationally well-known and translated authors such as Danilo Kiš and David Albahari. By focusing on work by Jewish and non-Jewish authors of three generations, it sheds light on the ethical and aesthetical aspects of the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust memory in the Yugoslav context. As such, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of Holocaust studies, cultural memory studies, literary studies, cultural history, cultural sociology, Balkan studies, and Eastern European politics.

Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collection breaks new ground on the role of emotions in Western environmentalism. Recent scholarship highlights how traffic between Romantic-era literature and science helped to catalyze Green Romanticism. Closer to our own moment, the affective turn reflects similar cross-disciplinary collaboration, as many scholars now see the physiological phenomenon of affect as a force central to how we develop conscious attitudes and commitments. Together, these trends offer suggestive insights for the study of Green Romanticism. While critics have traditionally positioned Romantic Nature as idealized and illusory, Romantic representations of nature are, in fact, ambivalent, scientifically informed, and ethically engaged. They often reflect writers' efforts to capture the fleeting experience of affect, raising urgent questions about how nature evokes feelings, and what demands these sensations place upon the feeling subject. By focusing on the affective dimensions of Green Romanticism, Wordsworth and the Green Romantics advances a vision of Romantic ecology that complicates scholarly perceptions of Romantic Nature, as well as popular caricatures of the Romantics as na•ve nature lovers. This collection will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, ecocriticism, affect studies, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.

Samuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster. This volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.