The MLA LLC English Romantic Forum and The North American Society for the Study of Romanticisim proposes a collaborative session that reassesses the relationship between Romanticism and posthumanism. The term “posthuman” will be criticially interrogated by all three papers in ways that engage with the MLA Presidential Theme of “Being Human.” This session is prompted by recent scholarship across Romantic studies, ecocriticism and philosophy that interrogates perceived and imagined thresholds between what is understood as human and nonhuman. Three twenty-minute papers will focus on the following aspects of the session’s topic: (1) the animal and the human (Broglio); (2) gender and posthumanism (Singer and Washington, jointly presented paper) and (3) the interaction of text, visuality and theories of human "being" (Effinger). Our session aims to generate new conversations that will confront unresolved problems in each of those areas in order more productively to take intellectual enquiry forward. The final 15 minutes of the session will be rigorously protected in order to ensure that such conversation takes place, and in ways that will onwardly develop throughout and beyond the Convention.

If approved, the session will bring together the research of four internationally recognised scholars in Romantic studies, ranging from the senior level of dictinction of Broglio to the early career brilliance of Effinger. Each paper will address questions of how theoretical and interpretative methodologies can advance understanding of how early-nineteenth-century literature can contribute to current debates about what it is to be human in a world increasingly concerned with anxiety about the posthuman.

Ron Broglio’s paper will begin the session by exploring how human interiority and sensitivity to the natural world can be better understood through an awareness and appreciation of animal and other nonhuman prosthetics. He will investigate how vitalist, animist, and sympathetic interactions between humans and animals shaped modes of thought from the early modern period through into the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. Looking forward to Jules Allix’s 1850 conceptualisation of a “snail sympathy,” by which a sort of typewriter of snails would communicate across distances, he will show how Romantic poetry sensed and expressed the ecology of relations in the world. Broglio argues that this ecology represents an expressive human interiority, but by articulating inter-species relations. Posthumanism, he contends, changes how we understand Romanticism into a multi-species, post-phenomenological way of being in the world.

The second paper presented jointly by Singer and Washington explores how human bodies are permeated in Romantic writing by a variety of nonhuman forces constantly that circulate around and through them. Mary Wollstonecraft’s concept of vapour and Percy Shelley’s west wind show, for example, how bodies must be seen as an entanglement of the human and the nonhuman. Singer and Washington argue that the consequences of these posthuman bodies’ permeable existence are revolutionary because they always already exceed the idea that human bodies are exclusively human. Taking the matter of gender as their focus, they will show that we can no longer define discrete sexed bodies or the genders that supposedly arise from them. The paper will investigate how Wollstonecraft’s and Shelley’s posthuman vision of bodies that matter because of their nonhuman matter evoke new forms of non-binary sexes and genders. The more fluid ideas of sex and gender offered by Romanicism will be shown to challenge binaristic, heteronormative drives in ways that force us to rethink the violence that emerges from bred species distinctions that, in the Anthropocene epoch, threaten extinction for humans and nonhumans alike.

The third paper by Effinger takes three points of departure: Cary Wolfe’s argument that “traditional humanism is no longer adequate to understand the human’s entangled, complex relations with animals, the environment, and technology”, Timothy Morton’s assertion that “Romanticism doesn’t have to be about big beautiful souls meditating on big mountains” (“Here Comes Everything”) and Gorgio Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine.” Effinger takes William Blake as her exemplar, showing how his poem Jerusalem, with its text and illustrations, critiques ideas about what is normatively human through figurations of animal-headed humans and “humanimals” including an the androgynous eagle-headed figure and a swan-woman. While these textual and visual representations still foreground the human subject, they will be shown ultimately to evacuate the ontological boundaries that privilege an objectified human being over the action of being human. Through her investigation, Effinger will demonstrate how the outsider Romanticism of Blake revels the continuing relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that “In truth . . . humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds” (A Thousand Plateaus).

We emphasize the range of materials to be covered: poetry, science, literary theory, and philosophy. Because the scholarship of our panelists is already well known and respected, we anticipate a large audience drawn from colleagues interested in environmental studies, aesthetic philosophy, poetics, and the history of science as well as Romantic studies.

We hope you will approve this session. The English Romantic Forum and NASSR each have a history of hosting well attended, intellectually stimulating sessions that address issues of real-world importance. Our topic underscores the broad and continuing intellectual appeal of Romanticist scholarship to the wider MLA membership.