Romanticism in the Age of World Wars

​This week I attended a conference on Romanticism in the Age of World Wars at the University of Leuven, which featured among many excellent panels three superb keynote speakers. You can find more information (including the booklet) on the conference's website.

Paul K. Saint-Amour gave a fascinating talk on the ways in which the discovery of archeological remains in the trenches of the Somme inspired a new kind of poetics that revolves around the ways in which words, too, are fossilised.

The Drop
​ Credit: Imperial War Museum

Marc Redfield gave the Geoffrey Hartman Memorial Lecture, in which he ​examined the story of the shibboleth test in Judges 12-13, and considered the ways in which Paul Celan displaces and rewrites this heritage in his poems “Schibboleth” and “In Eins."

Santanu Das focused on the South Asian experience in France, Mesopotamia and Germany and, in a moving way, examined its sensuous and emotional texture. ​

In my own contribution, I explored how W. H. Auden creatively engages with the form and ideological assumptions of the diplomatic sonnet in In Time of War, the third part of Auden’s and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War (1939), in which they describe their 1938 journey to the front of the Sino-Japanese War. This book also includes photographs that Auden took during his stay, which creates a dialogue between word and image that further complicates Auden’s criticism of the contemporary diplomatic system.