Romantic Remains (NASSR 2015)

Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham University Press), 2019

The current global environmental crisis is an uncanny but perversely material aftereffect of Victorian England, the world’s first fossil-fueled industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Our entanglement with this past challenges current procedures of cultural analysis, requiring a new attention to form and method, and bridging the divide between ecological and postcolonial approaches in nineteenth-century studies. In response we propose an ecological formalism, which focuses on the category of form as a means for producing environmental and therefore political knowledge. The chapters in this volume explore how Victorian writers recognized empire and ecology as posing problems of intellectual scale and recognize that these aesthetic or formal concerns generate challenges of critical methodology.

European Romantic Review, 2019

IJASS JOURNAL, 2019

The article traces the genealogy of the concept of Nature and landscape from the romanticism to the second industrial revolution. This archeology of ideas aims to dissect Nature as a subject of discourse in order to propose it as an "empty container" filled with fantasy and which has been instrumentalized by (sometimes) conservative power axes. The ongoing ecological crisis demands a set of new theoretical approaches towards what is that thing "out there" that we call Nature since the romantic paradigm only gives away a passive and contemplative image that serves to economic exploitation and aesthetical consumerism. Through the lens of eco-criticism, the aim is to dismantle and deconstruct the fantasy of Nature by proposing different entry points from interdisciplinarity and critical studies. I. NATURAL IMAGE AND ROMANTICISM. "Ecological writing keeps insisting that we are "embedded" in nature. Nature is a surrounding medium that sustains our being. Due to the properties of the rhetoric that evokes the idea of a surrounding medium, ecological writing can never properly establish that this is nature and thus provide a compelling and consistent aesthetic basis for the new worldview that is meant to change society. It is a small operation, like tipping over a domino…Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration." (Morton 2007: 5) Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement which appears in Europe by the late XVIII century, especially in Germany and England. The movement was a strong reaction to the Neoclassicist movement that evoked the classical figures of the ancient Roman and Greek civilizations as the absolute beauty canons in art. The romantic revolution takes place in an industrialized, urban and profoundly nostalgic Europe. About its name, etymologically the root-romantcomes from the French roman (novel) but these relationships are not fully clear. It was James Boswell who by the mid XVIII century mentions for the first time the term "romantic" describing certain landscapes surrounding an exile experience. Romanticism being an intellectual and artistic response to the rationalism present in the Enlightment and the neoclassicism put the creative weight on emotions. These feelings being experienced by the artist were the engine of their creative activity and, being the artist the catalyst of said feelings, this person became a creator/genius, an enlightened one. The tormented poet was the only way to be a real artist and said artist needed a unique and particular voice."We found ourselves in Germany at the end of the XVIII century where, as in many other places, there was a huge rebellion against the classical ideal of beauty which was confronted with much more poetic alternatives as the picturesque and the sublime. This being followed by the displacement of the reason by the emotions. Some wise men were expecting that a divine enlightment would reveal to them a series of inaccessible truths. This would lead to understand romanticism as a soul attitude, one that designs in every human individual the creative

Since Bill McKibben’s 1989 book, The End of Nature, it has become commonplace to pronounce the ‘end’ of that which, for many decades, we called nature. Although in many instances the reiterations of the end of nature do not agree with McKibben’s reasoning — instead, offering reasons quite contrary to his — they concur on the premise that nature is not a plausible or desirable concept for environmental thought or activism. Alongside this growing trend in environmental philosophy, a number of studies have recently appeared which reconsider the environmental significance of romanticism. While an environmental interest in romanticism is not surprising, it is very surprising given the increasingly pervasive critique of the idea of nature. After all, for the romantics, nature (not the environment, or ecology, or biodiversity) was the most significant and central concern. In this chapter, I offer an environmental reappraisal of romanticism, which takes account of the recent critiques of the idea of nature. My goals are historical and systematic. First, I seek to assess the validity of the environmentalist critique of the romantic conception of nature by distinguishing different traditions or strands within romantic thought. I argue that within romanticism, we find a tradition that emphasizes empirical experience, careful observation and methodological inquiry, and offers a conception of nature that cannot be criticized as an idealized or abstracted transcendental entity. Second, I consider the systematic significance of this “romantic empiricism,” and argue that while an abstract or idealized notion of nature is indeed problematic, a concrete conception that is achieved through the mutually supportive work of observation and reflection is essential for environmental thought. In particular, I contend that it is only on the basis of the kind of careful empirical observation and rigorous ontological account of nature that we find in the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that an environmental ethic is possible. In Goethe’s approach, we find a notion of epistemological responsibility or obligation that offers the first step toward developing a sustainable environmental ethic.

B. Olsen and Þ. Pétursdóttir (eds.) Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past. London: Routledge, 2014

Ecocriticism is a contemporary theory of analysing art or literature. The green criticism studies literature from nature's perspective. When environment is hot cake topic of the time, ecocriticism gains rapid popularity. The present study explores how study of nature evolves down the ages from Romanticism to Ecocriticism and how ecocriticism turns to be a modified version of Romanticism. There is a wide gap of almost two centuries between the movements. Yet there are some similarities that validate the claim that Ecocriticism is the reappraisal of romanticism in as broader sense. The rudiments of ecocriticism are found in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Southey, Clare and many other poets of the romantic age. The paper is an attempt to explore the ecocritical praxis of the Romantic Literature in general.

1995