Back to the UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC) - Archive of Past Events

"Aesthetic Materialism: Electric Language, Bodies, and Technology in American Romanticism"
Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English, California State University, Long Beach
January 19, 2006

Over the last few decades, dominant academic literary criticism has criticized, demystified, and dismissed aesthetics, but in the process it has largely de-historicized and de-materialized aesthetics itself.  Such criticism has, to use Robert Kaufmanˆs formulation, confused aesthetics with aestheticization.  I argue that a distinct strain of American romanticism imagined that electrical technology and science might provide new ways of understanding relationships between matter and force in the physical universe, the political structures of society, and the nature of language itself.  While Whitmanˆs body electric is perhaps the best-known example of poetic electricity, metaphors of electricity suffuse the works of British and American romantic poets and thinkers, often figuring either an intense, nearly physical emotion or an ecstatic, shocking sense of sympathy or transcendence.  As opposed to merely mechanical or idealist readings of poetics, mind, and society, electric romanticism invests in a type of indeterminate materialism, a materialism built less on a Newtonian notion of individual atoms (including atomized individuals) in motion than in the flow of forces disrupting, impinging upon, and reconfiguring the boundaries separating atom from atom, person from person.