The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]

Keats’s poetic thoughts on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism’s most incisive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. This essay is about the ways Keats’s verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons with an imaginative range. Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has “no i…[Read more]

The tunefulness of Proust and Senancour. From the silence of mountains to the silence of music

For Proust, great books are the “children of silence” (CSB, p. 309), and his novel endeavors to express what could not, in principle, be formulated: nature, sensations, in brief the physical and psychic existence as a whole. In his vision, lan…[Read more]

The tunefulness of Proust and Senancour. From the silence of mountains to the silence of music

For Proust, great books are the “children of silence” (CSB, p. 309), and his novel endeavors to express what could not, in principle, be formulated: nature, sensations, in brief the physical and psychic existence as a whole. In his vision, lan…[Read more]

It is well known that Walter Scott adapted the forms of sentimental fiction for his initial trilogy of novels on Scottish manners and that he drew on philosophical theories of sympathy when conceiving of his characters and placing them in historical relation to one another and to his readership. Scott’s adaptations of sentimentalism and of…[Read more]

Abstracts for the Two-Panel Series “More Is More: Rules and Riddles of Nineteenth-Century Vielschreiberei.” MLA Annual Convention, Washington, D.C., January 6–9, 2022.

*Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies,* Edited by Cristina León Alfar and Emily G. Sherwood, Routledge 2021, The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions. “Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne tells the story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and her ongoing di…[Read more]

A syllabus for a 300-level (3rd year) English literature course taught at the University of Victoria’s English department

Where was Baudelaire standing, when facing the “great questions” of the Infinite, of evil, and of the christian faith? Was he a Christian? This article does not aim to respond once for all to this question, instead it states two key words that may help to ask it in a more correct way: incarnation and charity.
Vedi la pubblicazione « Il cuore…[Read more]

This paper analyses the category of space in Fanny Taillandier’s last novel Par les
écrans du monde. We argue that Taillandier tries to “make sense” of 9/11 terrorist attack
through a stylistic recomposition of the dimension of space, while situating it in a
“geometry of words” that makes it meaningful and human again. In effect, in Taillandie…[Read more]