Aside from imperial traffic, an increased intellectual interchange between Britain and the Continent, and revolutionary upheaval all contributed to linguistic borrowing in the Romantic period. David Simpson’s Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger details Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dream of a new Greek lexicon, combining English, German, French, and Latin terms to better capture human experience. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s massive Neology: or Vocabulary of Words that are New or Renewed (1801) was a linguistic reflection of the revolutionary ideal, an attempt to create an entirely new language to reflect unprecedented historical change. This panel reflects these interwoven historical and philosophical developments.

While studies of nineteenth-century British intellectual culture are increasingly motivated to register the influence of colonized cultures, Fatima Burney’s paper looks in the opposite direction of linguistic traffic to the neologisms that Indo-Muslim intellectuals writing in Urdu acquired from their translated engagement with British literatures and British literary theory. In particular, it traces the adoption of two terms; naicharal shāi’rī, or natural poetry, and the much later entry of romāniyat which, though often translated as Romanticism, might be best comprehended as sentimentalism. The surprising differences between the poetic movements which mobilized around either term reveal that although British ‘Romantic’ thought had a profound effect on Indian literary modernism, the terms through which we may undertake a comparative analysis of Colonial Romanticism are not clear. The anglicized terms in question offer a valuable lens for considering how ‘Romanticism’—or the constellation of cultural phenomena that later critics gesture to using that term—was both cultural import and export.

Of the British Romantics, Coleridge was arguably the most invested in neologism’s philosophical and cultural potential. The session’s first paper, by Kiel Shaub, investigates Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s coining of a mental practice he called desynonymization. As a primer to intellectual inquiry of any kind, desynonymization, in Coleridge’s view, would promote the attachment of distinct significations to words that had hitherto been understood as synonymous. Beyond what he viewed as its role in cultivating the individual mind, Coleridge saw in this practice a means by which the accuracy and precision of a society’s common understanding could be measured and improved. The practice of desynonymization informs much of Coleridge’s own work, as when he desynonymized “regret” and “remorse” prompted him to change the title of his 1797 play Osorio to Remorse. Yet the most well-known of Coleridge’s acts of desynonymization was his distinction between the imagination and the fancy.

Inspired by, but moving away from Coleridge’s use of the word “psilology,” or “the love of empty noise,” Alexander Regier’s paper traces the word’s coining to German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, who described it as a word that “I have invented for pure reason.” When vacuous talk not only describes pure reason but also feeds it, we need to emphatically figure out why “the love of empty noise” is so powerful. It is too easy to dismiss this neologism as something antiquated, not new at all, not equipped to deal with the prescient things going on around us that are neither vacuous nor made of chatter. We are better off resisting the temptation to either glibly describe certain forms of academic, cultural, or political production as psilological; at the same time, we want to avoid underestimating the playfulness of this neologism, since much of its power lies in a humor that is precisely not philosophical. Regier’s paper considers the stakes of unpacking how the love of vacuous chatter shapes public discourse and can be used to critique it.

Susan Wolfson will serve as panel respondent.

All participants understand they must keep strictly to time, with three panelists and one respondent allotted 10 minutes each. Ten minutes is reserved for introductions, with 15-20 minutes designated for open discussion.