Redfield

Claremont Graduate University Professor Marc Redfield will present this year's Gottschalk Memorial Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 13, at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, on the Cornell University campus. It is free and open to the public.

Redfield, who holds the John D. and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Claremont, is an expert in the 19th century novel, literary and cultural theory and comparative European Romanticism. His lecture, "Sovereignty, Romanticism and the War on Terror," is the leading event of a two-day conference on "Unconfinable Romanticism," to be held Oct. 14 and 15 in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. For a complete schedule see http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/unconfinable-program.html.

Redfield's lecture refers to his book, nearing completion, "Romanticism and the War on Terror," said Jonathan Culler, Cornell Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature. The book claims that the idea and idiom of a "war on terror" first took shape in Europe during the 1790s, as French Jacobin and British counter-revolutionary writers sought terms to describe an unprecedented historical event: the French Revolution.

"The history of our notion of a war on terror turns out, under inspection, to overlap with the history of many other phenomena that first took modern form in the Romantic era: global revolution and total war; democracy, the nation-state and the 'citizen'; international law and human rights; an ambivalently secularized model of sovereignty -- in the form of the social contract and the declaration of independence, rights, etc. -- and, finally, the idea and institution of literature," Culler said. "Our modern, aesthetic notion of literature came into being in ambivalent proximity to what Romantic-era critics called the 'terrorist school of writing'-- we now call this sort of writing Gothic."

Culler added that "a close examination of the Romantic and post-Romantic discourse of terror helps illuminate not just the historical roots, but also the metaphysical makeup and rhetorical power of the Bush administration's declaration of a war -- rather than a police action -- against terror, rather than against terrorists."

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, author of "The Meanings of Hamlet" (1972), a professor of English at Cornell and a scholar of British Renaissance literature, who died in 1977 at the age of 38.