Professor Lisa Kasmer: “Trauma and Cultural Memory in Romanticism”

Respondent Professor Emma Clery

ABSTRACT
Echoing the title of Percy Shelley’s political sonnet in the name of his own study, James Chandler’s England in 1819 treats the ideologically impelled penning of history in literary texts, with the literature of Romanticism standing as the exemplum of such historicizing. Similar to the Romantic age, Chandler argues, English writing from 1819 is concerned with a national “self-making.” Many literary scholars view Shelly’s composing politically confrontational works in reaction to the political events of 1819 as self-consciously delineating the culture of the time. Instead, I would argue that rather than enacting a “national self-making,” through his work Shelley signifies a national unmaking in unveiling the ambivalent status of the nation. Similarly, against scholarly responses that invest the national ideology within Jane Austen’s domestic novels with a certain transparency, highlighting the narrative of her work reveals the historical trauma problematizing her seemingly coherent national ideology, much like the nationalism in Shelley.

Exploring the literary works of Romantic writers like Percy Shelley and Jane Austen in conjunction with the postcolonial theory of Homi Bhabha and the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth, I tease out the intersections between nationalist discourse and trauma narratives to suggest that nationhood is depicted as articulating its image through the construction of its national subjects, and, as such, like trauma, is incomprehensible to the subjects themselves. In effect, the model of the nation in these works contrasts sharply with the national ideal upheld in Regency Britain, spurred by successes in the Napoleonic War, which established a stable national culture.

Professor Emma Clery: “‘Ingenious speculations on the utter ruin of England’: Trauma and National Crisis in Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”

Respondent Professor Lisa Kasmer

ABSTRACT
Barbauld’s poem, published early in 1812, arose from deeply-felt moral opposition to the war against Napoleon. The start of the poem briefly alludes to the suffering experienced by civilian victims of the conflict, and the grief of the wives and mothers of soldiers. But she quickly turns from the expected objects of pity to pursue a different strategy: an assault on nationalist sentiment. The England of the near future is visualized in ruins, deserted, the destination of curious tourists from America. The defeat and destruction of the nation is represented as inevitable. The poem caused a storm of protest not only from the Tory press but even some of Barbauld’s friends and former allies. It was described as ‘cowardly’, ‘dastardly’, ‘unkindly and unpatriotic – we had almost said unfilial’. Past critics have tended to interpret the uproar as the inevitable backlash against a woman writer entering the realm of political debate in support of an unpopular cause. I argue that Barbauld’s ‘ingenious speculations on the utter ruin of England’ were a deliberate provocation, intended to bring home the trauma of war, in the interests of changing government policy. My research on the events surrounding the poem suggests that it was published as part of a concerted campaign, which against the odds, succeeded in its aims. The discussion here will touch on recent considerations of nationalism, trauma, war and the efficacy of imagery in protest literature by Martha Nussbaum, Susan Sontag, and others.

Professor Diane Long Hoeveler: “Mourning in Plain View: On Monuments, Trauma, Historical Memory, and Forgetting”

Respondent Professor David Punter

ABSTRACT
This essay presents a fairly Freudian-centered reading of trauma literature and nationalistic allegory because both, I would contend, can be read through the use of his theories. Following a reading of the first lecture Freud gave at Clark University in 1909, Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences, the article examines his theories of trauma and their relation to what I label the “nationalism script”: applying Freud’s theories about fantasies to the construction of nationalism or citizenship, then, we could say that a nation-state builds its unique identity on cultivating in its subjects intense legends about their quasi-supernatural origins as a people (Romulus and Remus, etc.). A nation-state employs something like a seduction scenario, placing her citizens in quasi-erotic positions in relation to a “father-land” or a “mother-land,” to whom one owes love, fealty, loyalty, and obedience. Finally, the nationalism script genders its citizens, relegating them into categories that proscribe active or passive behaviors (being a soldier or breeding soldiers for the cause). And then death is the ultimate sacrifice that one can make for the nation-state, and those who make this sacrifice are rewarded with a permanent and public monument about which the populace flocks on specified occasions. The glorious dead are resurrected in the myth that the nation-state constructs about its founding and maintenance, all of which leads to yet another generation perpetuating the same pattern. This article argues that a number of literary texts published during the nineteenth century and in reaction to Napoleon’s imperialistic agenda increasingly interrogated the nationalism script, and then it focuses on Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy as a representative early nineteenth-century text.

Professor David Punter: “Trauma, Gothic, Revolution”

Respondent Professor Diane Long Hoeveler

ABSTRACT
It was the Marquis de Sade who first claimed that English Gothic was a response to les évènements in France. While this begs certain questions of historical accuracy, Gothic in its late eighteenth and early nineteenth century manifestations was crucially bound up with assertions of nationalism, and especially concerned with a perceived northern European version of ‘democracy’ as opposed to a Mediterranean complex of tyrannies. Thus a picture of Europe is here displayed, and it is played out in the Gothic in oppositions between continuity/inheritance and trauma/usurpation.

Professor Murray Pittock FRSE: “Being British: Will we ever recover?”

Respondent Professor Ali Behdad

ABSTRACT
‘Being British: Will we ever recover ?’examines the limitations of theories of national formation and development in explaining the British case. It argues that ‘Britain’ as a nation and ‘Britishness’ as concept of belonging have always been sustained by an international set of constitutional and cultural practices reinforced by local diversities rather than by nation-state homogeneity. Both the formation and the current crisis of the British state are marked by traumatic events: the warfare and revolts of 1745-1815 and the incessant claim for international influence and particularist entitlement of the era from 1956 to the current EU budget round. The simultaneous need to create a new homogenous Britishness internally to sustain the projection of the more traditional aggrandizing Britishness abroad is a paradoxical feature of the modern era, and one which marks out the difficulty of ‘recovering’ nationality from the imperial formula of British particularism.

Professor Ali Behdad: “Memory and Disavowal in Figuring Muslim Immigrants within National Discourse”

Respondent Professor Murray Pittock FRSE

ABSTRACT
In this talk, I offer a general discussion of the production and cultural workings of immigration politics in Western Europe, a politics marked by a profound disavowal of certain historical traumas embedded in the continent’s relationship with its immigrants. Although attentive to historical and sociological differences in the immigration debate in Western European nations, my talk will focus on how Muslim immigrants are perceived and represented by politicians, political pundits, and in the media throughout Western Europe in a way that negates certain historical traumas. My interests in this paper lie in the cultural and political implications of such views in the context of everyday lives of Muslim immigrants. What do representations of Muslim immigrants reveal about the broader politics of immigration in Europe? How do these representations contribute to contemporary political debates about immigration ideologically? And finally, how do these representations enable an exclusive form of national identity in Western European countries such as France, England, Germany, and Holland?