Feb 23: Keats’s Sceptical Poetics
- ewsm91
- Feb 15, 2024
- 1 min read
Date: February 23, 2024 (Friday)
Time: 4:30PM
Venue: Music Library Lecture Room, 11/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Details and registration:
All are welcome. No registration required.
Speaker:
LI Ou, Associate Professor, Department of English, CUHK
Discussant:
Tara LEE, Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, HKU
The talk discusses Keats’s affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats’s poetry anew in this light. Specifically, it explores the influence of Voltaire’s sceptical ideas on Keats, especially his sceptical take on the problem of evil. It then gives a reading of Keats’s ‘Isabella’ to demonstrate his experiment with poetic language, verse form, and the genre of romance, an experiment that reveals Keats’s self-reflexive and radical sceptical poetics in challenging poetic dogmas and conventions.
LI Ou is Associate Professor at Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Keats and Scepticism (Routledge, 2024), Keats and Negative Capability (Continuum, 2009), ‘Shelley’s Scattered Words in China’. Romanticism 29.3 (2023): 293-304, ‘Keats, Montaigne, and Hamlet’ (East-West Dialogues: The Transferability of Concepts in the Humanities, Peter Lang, 2021), and ‘British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised, and Resurrected’ (Asian English: Histories, Texts, Institutions, Palgrave, 2021). Her research interests include Romantic poetry, especially Keats, and cultural/literary relations between Greater China and Britain.
Society of Fellows in the Humanities
The sceptical poetics of Keats reveal the conflict between beauty and uncertainty in Romantic literature. His reflexive style prompts contemplation—much like I feel upon struggling and thinking, write my law assignment for me, overwhelmed with complexity.