Image: The Ecstasis of St. Cecilia, Raphael (1514) (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Guest Post: Eric Gidal (University of Iowa)
It will be difficult for me to convey adequately the intellectual, culinary, cultural, and scenic delights provided to participants in this international conference. I might begin by noting the generous hospitality and mentioning the opening welcomes provided by officials of both the university and the city of Bologna, punctuated by the university choir Collegium Musicum Almae Matris; the guided tours of the Municipal Art Collection and the National Art Gallery of Bologna, the latter following the performative “Reading Raphael’s St. Cæcilia: Passages from Romantic Travellers”; the musical performances of the pianist Claudia D’Ippolito – who offered a program of Brahms, Liszt, and Chopin – and, in Bologna’s beautiful Museo della Musica, the trio of Giambattista Giocoili, Valentino Corvino, and Andrea Rebaudengo – who presented pieces by the Parisian “Group of Six,” musicians of the early twentieth century who followed the inspiration of Eric Satie; and a conference banquet to end all conference banquets to which I will return in concluding these remarks. The city of Bologna itself, of course, offered endless pleasures to those willing to stray from the conference’s full schedule and wander the miles of porticoed streets and surrounding Apennine foothills. The true pleasure of this conference for its many international visitors was surely the opportunity to tour both aesthetic and intellectual treasures with such ease.
The one-day pre-conference organized by CISR on the Italian Presence on the British Stage offered a wonderful introduction to the transnational themes and perspectives of the larger conference. Moving chronologically through a variety of forms from Shakespearean and Jacobean drama through Italian opera and Romantic pantomime, the Italian and British participants provided a strong survey of the mutually influential relationship between the two national traditions. Shakespeare was a recurrent point of reference. Ann Thompson (King’s College, London) presented a study of Charlotte Lenox’s reflections on Shakespeare’s Italy. Gaetano Falco and Alessandra Squeo (Università di Bari) offered a linguistic analysis of lexical migration between Italian and English in The Merchant of Venice. And Fernando Cioni (Università di Firenze) assessed Ernesto Rossi’s English performances of Hamlet. Vittoria Intonti (Università di Bari) reflected on the late-sixteenth century dramatic criticism of Giovanni Battista Guarini as pioneering an “audience based” conceptualization of genre in response to the tragicomedies of the Jacobean stage. Giuseppe Galigani (Università di Firenze) and Fabio Liberto (Università di Bologna) gave learned studies of the influence in Britain of Italian operas and the dramatic theories of Luigi Riccoboni respectively, while Nick Havely (University of York) and Jane Moody (University of York) offered fascinating accounts of the cultural influences of the Dante recitations of Gustavo Modena and the pantomimes of Joseph Grimaldi on the London stages of the early nineteenth century. The cumulative impression of these international and interdisciplinary presentations was of the fundamentally comparative motivations behind the critical theories and aesthetic gestures of the culture of modernity, an impression whose parameters were explored endlessly in the larger conference that these proceedings inaugurated with such rigor and collegiality.
Indeed, at the end of the same day, Stuart Curran (University of Pennsylvania) formulated these connections between transnational migrations and aesthetic configurations in his plenary lecture “Romanticism Displaced and Placeless,” in which he valorized Shelley’s “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” as a paradigmatic masterpiece of topographical epistemology enabled by a condition of exile. Citing both Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and Mme de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (a naturally recurrent reference throughout the conference), his reflections suggested a model of Romanticism as the moment at which the comparative vision of culture already engendered by several centuries of Anglo-Italian exchange assumes a reflexive stance in its own literary productions. The sessions which followed could thus be seen, at least by this overfed and sleep-deprived tourist, as a series of lucid meditations on Romanticism as an inherently transnational discourse. A session on “Imagining Homelands” convened by Alan Bewell (University of Toronto), with Samuel Baker (University of Texas), Theresa Kelley (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Maureen McLane (Harvard University) repeatedly insisted upon the international and cosmopolitan structures of nativist representations in botany, poetry, and national songs. A session on “British Romantic Poets Imagining Venice” convened by Janet Todd (University of Aberdeen) focused naturally on Byron with offerings by Anna Rosa Scrittori (Università di Venezia), Sema Postacioglu (Università di Venezia), and Carla Pomarè (Università del Piemonte Orientale). And a session on “Transnational Exchanges: Britain, Russia and Italy” offered a range of formal and thematic studies from Gabriella Imposti (Università di Bologna), Philip Rand (Independent Scholar), Natalia Mikhilova (SUNY, Buffalo), and Maureen McCue (University of Glasgow), whose paper on “Hazlitt and the Bolognese School of Art” provided a nicely localized reflection on the recurrent influence of the Italian schools on the aesthetic and political theories of Romantic criticism.
An early session on the second day convened by Thomas Pfau (Duke University) on “Rousseau, Goethe, and Modernity” offered two compelling presentations on figures whose work attests more clearly than any of their contemporaries to the cosmopolitan and comparativist origins of European Romanticism. Jane K. Brown (University of Washington) offered, by way of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, a reading of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as an ambivalent and even hostile response to the theories of socialization offered in Emile. Vivaswan Soni (Northwestern University) presented a paper on “fictions of judgment” in Emile that reflected on Rousseau’s paradoxical deployment of a narrative rather than a theory of judgment as a means of normalizing an ostensibly self-liberating activity. A second panel that same morning on “Transnational Things” convened by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (University of Colorado, Boulder) could be seen as an extension of this earlier panel’s concerns with education and epistemology in an international Romantic moment. But here the focus was on object relations in the developmental narratives found in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui, Staël’s Corinne, and Chateaubriand’s Atala. In all three papers by Lynn Festa (Rutgers University), Heydt-Stevenson, and Peter Hutchings (Princeton University), cosmopolitanism appeared as a mode of affect that promises to raise the individual out of the torpor of a purely local or native imagination, yet offering ultimately a paradoxical if productive tension between the utopian and the physical manifested in accounts of aestheticized objects.
Aestheticized object relations are plentiful in a city like Bologna, a point that was duly reinforced by the special presentation that afternoon in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna on Raphael’s St. Cæcilia and its recurrent representation in the writings of Romantic-period travelers from Goethe to Sydney Owenson. Traditional distinctions between the classical and the romantic faded in the repetition of conventions expressed in these writings, which persistently used a rhetoric of synesthesia to align the painter’s craft with the heavenly choir whose majesty defeats as irrelevant the earthly productions below. The presentation led seamlessly into a wider tour of the museum’s holdings and an evening of dining and musical entertainment throughout the city.
The next morning I climbed the Asinelli tower for a panoramic view of the city and enjoyed a relaxed morning of unapologetic tourism. Having wandered back and forth between my hotel and the university buildings where the conference was housed, I had passed repeatedly by the bustling Piazza Maggiore and the Basilica di San Petronio, the iconic Due Torri , and the tranquil Basilica Santo Stefano. It was now time for me to pause and enjoy their architectural wonders.
I did find my way back to the conference proceedings for two final panels on the third day. The first, on “Women and Inter/National Discourse” featured two papers on Sydney Owenson by Evgenia Sifaki (Greek Open University) and Anna Maria Preti (Università di Bologna) and a third on Staël’s Corinne by Evy Varsamopoulou (University of Cyprus). This last focused on Staël’s “cosmopolitan sociality” and its production of an ethos of national sovereignty, demonstrating once again how Romantic configurations of the local and the particular were inaugurated by an enlightenment discourse of comparative cultural critique. At the end of the conference proceedings, I participated in one of the final panels, the capaciously entitled “Within and Beyond the Nation: Politics and Poetics.” Susan Wolfson (Princeton University) offered a comparative account of portraits of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and Lord Byron; Lance Wilder (University of Georgia) provided a review of Romantic figurations of the gypsy in the winters of the 1837 Newdigate Prize; Sara Guyer (University of Wisconsin, Madison) spoke on John Clare and the question of justice; and I delivered a paper on melancholy as a tension between autonomy and custom in, once again, Staël’s Corinne.
I no doubt missed many excellent papers in making the necessary choices among an array of fascinating topics, to say nothing of the seductive charms of Bologna itself. And there are certainly as many ways to characterize this eclectic and international conference as there were participants, but all who attended will remember the final evening’s reception and banquet, held at the Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande, a grand seventeenth century building in the heart of the city that houses part of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in majestic rooms decorated with frescoes by Giuseppe Maria Crespi and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bolognese artists. The monumental architecture and exquisite dining were complemented by Commedia dell’Arte players and the Coro da Camera di Bologna. Dessert was served well after midnight and when I finally left at 1:30 a.m., most of the conference attendees were still enjoying a full evening’s entertainment. As many had early flights that morning, the general strategy was simply to move directly from the banquet to the airport.
The organizers of this conference did a superlative job for which all attendees owe a great debt of gratitude.
———-
Eric Gidal is the author of ‘British Romanticism in the Museum Age: A Review of Recent Scholarship‘, Literature Compass 3.2 (2006): 127-137, doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00301.x
Tags: CISR, Conferences, NASSR, Romanticism
