Andrew Warren: Romantic Entanglements

**Change in Termcard**

For our final seminar this term, Thursday, March 7th, we would like to welcome Dr. Andrew Warren, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University.

He will be speaking on 'Romantic Entanglements'

Abstract:

The term “entanglement” comes from the Old Norse (tang) for a kind of seaweed. In

Middle English (tangil, tangyl) it became primarily a social or legal term; someone

“entangled” someone else by encumbering, hampering or embarrassing them in human

affairs—legal, financial, social. Entanglement thereby implies a connection both material

and immaterial, and that also does not form a unity. It is more often a kind of burden, a

half-unwanted but seemingly necessary connection; it therefore registers an anxiety or

unease largely absent from a more settled or conventional notion such as “Wholeness” or

“Organic Unity.”

In this talk I will trace a history of this trope which, I argue, becomes particularly amplified

in Romantic and proto-Romantic texts. If in Enlightenment discourses—from empiricist

philosophies of mind, to political theory, to medicine—entanglement is most often used

as a metaphor to describe confusion or metaphysical extravagance, in the Romantic era

entanglement becomes a self-consciously employed concept used to explore a range of

issues. I will focus, in particular, on work by Sterne, Rousseau, Shelley and Wordsworth.