Ian Balfour (York, Canada)
Extreme Austen
Wednesday, 12 March 2025
RHB 138 and online
Register here for the Zoom link.
With responses from:
Rowan Boyson (KCL)
Paul Hamilton (QMUL)
About the talk
With all the attention lavished on Jane Austen’s fiction with an eye to narrative technique, irony, the marriage plot(s), class and gender relations, and more, a certain aspect of her rhetoric – or that of her characters – tends to be overlooked. Her body of fiction is generally known for its texture and ethos of decorum and propriety and yet the novels feature, on inspection, a pronounced, punctual rhetoric of excess. This talk asks: what is this excessive rhetoric doing? What do we make of it?
About the speakers
Ian Balfour is Professor emeritus of English at York University in Canada. His interests include Romantic poetry and prose, contemporary theory and criticism, and 18th-century literature and philosophy (especially aesthetic theory and philosophy of language). He is the author of Northrop Frye (1988), The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002) and of essays on the Romantics (Wordsworth, Blake, Godwin, Inchbald), Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and on topics in popular culture (music, TV, film). He co-edited with Atom Egoyan, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, and with Eduardo Cadava, And Justice For All?: The Claims of Human Rights (SAQ), and is the sole editor of a collection called Late Derrida (SAQ).
Rowan Boyson is Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at King’s College London, where she specialises in environmental humanities, history of philosophy and political thought, and critical theory and aesthetics. She is currently working on a project entitled The Shared Air: Atmosphere and the Right to Breathe in Enlightenment Britain.
Paul Hamilton is Professor emeritus of English at Queen Mary University of London. He specialises in Enlightenment and Romantic thought and the relations between philosophy, political theory, and literature. His monographs include Metaromanticism (Chicago, 2003) which explored historical transformations of the Romantic aesthetic; Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic (2007); Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (2013), which compares the writings of some major German, French, and Italian Romantics with an eye to their differences from British Romanticism.
Free and open to the public.
Contact: j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk
The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London 