Adam Potkay and Vivasvan Soni – Joint Seminar

Date: 3 November, 2016
Time: 12:30pm-2:30pm
Venue: 2nd floor meeting room, John Medley Building, The University of Melbourne
Register: Register online here

“Something Evermore about to Be: The Transformation of Hope in the Romantic Era”, Professor Adam Potkay (College of William & Mary)

In my talk, I’ll sketch what happens to the Janus-faced figures of hope in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My argument is this: hope, once a theological virtue and potential secular vice, features in the eighteenth century as a neutral element of secular psychology. As a psychological mechanism, hope comes in the Romantic era to underwrite a new, semi-secularized virtue: the hope, more or less independent of revealed religion, for more life, a better or perfected condition of the individual or of the species in time or eternity. This new and indeterminate hope directs us, however, towards a receding horizon. It is hope that aims “beyond hope,” and beyond conceptualization: William Wordsworth’s “something evermore about to be”; Percy Shelley’s hope for a hope realized beyond “its own wreck”; John Stuart Mill’s imaginative hope that arises on the far side of his rebuttal of all arguments for immortality. While Romantic-era hope doesn’t supersede or displace the orthodox theological virtues, it does supplement or vie with them, and thus figures in what has been called the modern “differentiation” between religious and secular/poetic modes of authority.

Adam Potkay is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA. His most recent books are Wordsworth’s Ethics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. The Story of Joy has been translated into Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, and Polish. Professor Potkay is currently working on a glossary of ethics/emotions in literature.

“”Gigantic Shadows of Futurity”: Some Modern Anxieties about Representing the Future”, Associate Professor Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern University)

Modernity is often characterized by a fascination with change, revolution, novelty and the future. One might think, for example, of Bacon’s proposals for a futuristic academy of science at the end of New Atlantis, or the aesthetics of novelty as it comes to be articulated in the eighteenth century. Moderns, we are told, are so obsessed with their orientation to the future, their desire to bring about the future, that they risk becoming unmoored from the past and tradition. Yet there is a paradox lurking here, namely that there is also within modernity a pervasive unease about representing the future. My paper will explore this unease, and some of the reasons for it. I will begin by discussing some examples from contemporary critical theory, such as Derrida’s messianism, Jameson’s “utopian archipelago,” or Edelman’s No Future. I will then consider how the aversion to representing the future might have its genesis in certain cultural and intellectual formations of the long eighteenth century: Bacon’s critique of final causes; Locke’s account of motivation in the Essay; Mandeville’s articulation of a market logic of cognition that becomes so pervasive in the period; certain aspects of realist representation in eighteenth-century novels; Romantic imaginings of the the future in Wordsworth’s Prelude or Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

Vivasvan Soni is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. His book, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (2010), won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. He is working on a project that probes the long history of our discomfort with judgment, tracing its genesis in eighteenth-century discourses of empiricism and aesthetics.