“Confounded Fantasies”: Byron and Romantic Platonism

CEMS and ANU English are pleased to host Professor James Chandler (University of Chicago) for this in-person seminar.

Abstract

Behind the mock outrage of Byron’s ridicule of Plato’s ‘confounded fantasies’ in the first canto of Don Juan lies a years-long encounter with the Platonic dialogues and their protagonist, Socrates, whom Byron once called ‘Athena’s wisest son’. Byron certainly took issue with his friend Shelley’s Platonic views and commitments, especially on the issue of Platonic love. And he rewrote the Platonic moments in Rousseau and Wordsworth, as well. But a careful review of the evolution of Byron’s engagements with Plato’s writings, especially in the unfolding of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (where the comment about Socrates is to be found), shows how intricately Byron’s own confounded fantasies were entangled with what he would have found in such works as the Symposium and the Phaedrus. Socrates’s representation of love as a kind of divine mania in these dialogues achieved particular importance for Byron poetry, especially in the context of what Louis Crompton has called ‘Greek love’.

About the Speaker

James Chandler is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of English, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College, at the University of Chicago. Professor Chandler was director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago between 2001 and 2018, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Irish Academy. His research encompasses the Romantic movement, the study of lyric poetry, the history of the novel, the Scottish Enlightenment, the sentimental mode, and cinema studies. He has authored three books on English Romanticism: Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984), England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1999), which won the 2000 Gordon J. Laing Award for distinction in academic publishing, and An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (2013).