Assembling the Pleasures of Pedagogy with Keats
ICR 2018, Greenville, SC
Thursday October 25 @ 4:00 pm
KLP co-founder Brian Rejack will be chairing this panel at ICR 2018, sponsored by Romantic Circles Pedagogies, and featuring papers from KLP alums Renee Harris, Olivia Loksing Moy, and David Sigler. Check back here for related resources.
Panel abstract:
An opening assumption: teaching assembles. We bring together bodies, texts, histories, joys, traumas, lives, deaths. This roundtable seeks to build upon the forms of assembly inherent to teaching by adopting a focus on pleasure. Pursuing a pedagogy emphasizing the pleasurable, the useless, and the nonproductive can offer a necessary corrective to the privileging of utilitarian instrumentality in contemporary education. As a starting point for exploring these concerns, we turn to how John Keats articulates the nature and the significance of various forms of pleasure. The roundtable participants adopt disparate approaches, but they each treat Keats’s work as a resource for querying what we value in education.
Papers:
Renee Harris (Lewis-Clark State College), “The Cognitive Work of Commonplacing”
Olivia Loksing Moy (Lehman College, CUNY), “Keats in the Bronx: Teaching through Archives and Afterlives”
Jonathan Mulrooney (College of the Holy Cross), “Teaching What Should Not Be Taught”
Michele Speitz (Furman University), “Keatsian Pedagogies that We ‘Can put no end to'”
David Sigler (University of Calgary), “Lessons in the Pleasure Principle: Teaching Keats’s ‘Fancy'”
Panelist Bios:
Renee Harris is an Assistant Professor of British Literature at Lewis-Clark State College, where she teaches courses in Romanticism and the Long Eighteenth Century. Her research examines the physiology of sympathy in the writer-reader relationship by placing eighteenth-century medical knowledge alongside the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Renee seeks to understand how the circulation of affect is theorized and staged by Romantic narrative and how texts become sites of shared feeling. Recently, her article “The Material Sublime and Storytelling Circles in Keats’s Isabella” appeared in Romantic Circles PRAXIS, May 2018.
Olivia Loksing Moy is an assistant professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where she teaches Romantic and Victorian poetry. She is currently at work on a monograph about the 1790s Gothic novel and the major Victorian poets, as well as a translation project that explores Latin-American receptions of John Keats. Olivia is a coordinator for the yearly Activism in Academia symposium held at the Graduate Center and has recently founded the CUNY Rare Book Scholars, an initiative that seeks to increase student engagement with material texts within undergrad courses. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Women’s Writing, Public Books, V21, and the Keats Letters Project.
Jonathan Mulrooney is Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross and editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal. He is the author of Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt, and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News (2018), as well as many essays and chapters on Romantic-period poetry. He is at work on several articles on Keats which may or may not become a book entitled Keats’s Vanishing Figures.
Michele Speitz is associate professor of English Literature at Furman University. She is co-editor of Romantic Circles Scholarly Editions, and is finalizing a monograph on technological aesthetics in addition to developing an edited collection on romantic technology with Joseph Lamperez. Forthcoming from Studies in Romanticism is an article-length version of a chapter from her book project entitled “Lyres, Levers, Boats, and Steam: Shelley’s Dream of a Correspondent Machine.”
David Sigler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis 1753–1835 (2015) and various articles on British Romanticism and psychoanalysis.