“Imagining Deleuze’s Romanticism”
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) 2025 Virtual CFP

Deleuze notes in Negotiations that he did not have the chance to write “the book [he’d] like to have done about literature” (143) as he had done for other artforms like cinema and painting. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of great thinkers who “lay out a new plane of immanence” and “draw up a new image of thought” to “change how we think,” (What is Philosophy) this seminar probes the unexplored commonality between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art and British and German Romantic writers such as Percy Shelley, William Blake, and F.J.W. Schelling, to establish new images of thought of and within Romantic literature. If Romanticism is defined as a movement which identifies “points from or axes along which … systems[s] can be transformed” (1), as Robert Mitchell and Ron Broglio suggest, this seminar probes the sites of these axes which generate new images of thought in, and between, Romantic writers and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art. This seminar invites participants to consider the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art, such as their works on painting, cinema, and literature, and a variety of Romantic writers to establish new ways of thinking and navigating within Romantic literature (or other discourses, such as Romantic philosophy, considered as literature). If Deleuze locates in his writing on philosophy and art an invention of concepts, such as Lewis Carroll’s “paradoxes of senses”, Kafka’s innovative concept of law, and Modern cinema’s creation of the time-image, to what extent can we examine the existence of these and other concepts in Romantic literary works on which Deleuze and Guattari have not explicitly commented? How might we use Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art as paradigms by which Romantic literature can be reimagined, deterritorialized, and newly encountered?


Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

-The extent to which Romantic aesthetic tracts (e.g., A Defence of Poetry, Biographia Literaria, Wordsworth’s prefaces to Lyrical Ballads and his 1815 Poems) unsettle themselves, and instead rhizomatically reorganize and reform new images of thought.

-Topics that explore how Deleuze’s writing on art like painting and cinema (Logic of Sense, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, The Fold, Cinema1&2etc) inform lines of flight within literature. Put differently, how does Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on painting, literature, and cinema trace how literature creates resistances to its own settlement and unity? Is literature repelled or attracted to the resistance of its unity, territorialization, or organization as a body?

-Topics that concern Romantic mythologies and (de)territorialization (e.g., Blake’s fractured mythological system that is marked by its own deterritorialization and resistance to a unifying interpretation, Shelley’s re-writing of Prometheus, and Keats’ reframing of Titanomachia in his unfinished Hyperion).

-Romantic fragments (e.g. The Triumph of Life, The Recluse, Hyperion etc) and their relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art.

-Topics that concern optics and/or images in Romantic literature and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s books on Cinema (Cinema1&2) and art (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation).

-The relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art and Romantic philosophy, that may be read as literature. For example, one might consider the relation between Deleuze’s philosophy of difference or transcendental empiricism and Schelling’s Ages of the World.

-The relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on impersonality, whether through their notion of an impersonal productive ‘flow’ of desire, or their schizoanalysis without a subject, and Romantic literature.

NOTE:

Organizer: Adam Mohamed is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Ontario. His research concerns the intersections between Romantic poetry and philosophy.

NOTE: Please submit abstracts (around 200-300 words) and bios (around 100 words) to Adam Mohamed (amoha228@uwo.ca). If you have questions about the CFP, please email Adam Mohamed (amoha228@uwo.ca). Please also note that the upcoming NASSR 2025 conference is completely virtual, so travelling is unnecessary.