The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Cultures Workshop, along with the Poetry and Poetics Workshop, is pleased to present:

How can we explain the appearance of narrating subjects who are dead yet capable of distinctively embodied modes of thought and feeling in late-Victorian poetry?  This essay seeks out the chemical conception of life that allowed Victorian physiologists to attribute sensation and cognition to bodily matter itself, rather than to the self produced by that matter.  By dissolving the lyric I into sensations that appear to arise directly from the objects being perceived, Swinburne uses scenes of death to imagine sensory experience outside the framework of the self.  Recent work by Catherine Malabou and Davide Panagia helps us visualize what the body’s sensory potential looks like outside durational mental forms and political models of personhood.