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Faculty: Philology and History

Chair: English Literature

Type of scholarship: 3-month-scholarship

Duration: 01.02.2024 - 30.04.2024

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Short CV

Irene Valenti is a PhD candidate and assistant lecturer at the University of Augsburg. Her dissertation project Daemonic Matter: The Material Sublime in Romantic Poetry seeks to expand theories of the sublime from a new materialist perspective, revisiting the power and gender dynamics implicit in the category and challenging standing assumptions of the canon. Her further research interests include gender and queer studies, women’s writing and contemporary body-horror narratives. She currently teaches classes on English Romanticism and 19th-century literature and is assistant editor for the academic journal Anglia.

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Research Interests:

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???????? Romantic poetry

???????? New materialisms

???????? Affect theories

???????? Gender studies

???????? Horror narratives

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Abstract of the funded project

Daemonic Matter: The Material Sublime in Romantic Poetry

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The dissertation aims to develop a theory of the ‘material sublime’ that synthesizes contrasting notions of sublimity as either a characteristic of the object following Edmund Burke or a faculty of the thinking subject in the Kantian tradition. In the two major eighteenth-century philosophies of the sublime and in its following theorizations, a stark divide between subject and object, thought and matter, mind and nature, arises: whether born of thought or of a material object, the sublime remains bound to transcendental questions, seemingly revealing a world beyond the material – whether unattainable for the human subject or revealing of the mind’s own transcendental power, the sublime is strongly bound to transcendentalist and antimaterialist philosophical tendencies. Following in the footsteps of many theorists who have attempted to bridge the gap between the worldly and transcendental realms of sublimity, recent developments in literary theory, particularly those approaches that fall under the category of ‘new materialisms’, can provide the impetus for a compelling new reading of the sublime that synthesizes contrasting notions and revises the transcendentalist tendencies of sublime discourse in favor of a renewed appreciation of the material realm and of the textual realizations of the category. The material sublime unifies contrasting philosophies under the mode of a material experience born of the intra-relation between embodied subjects and agentic objects.?The analysis of the material sublime in Romantic poetry then focuses on the theme of the Daemonic as a specific instance of the sublime that recurs throughout the Romantic period in different incarnations. The project also tackles issues of difference creation and power structures that are inherent to the philosophy of the sublime, revising instances of feminine Daemonic that have been historically read through the gendered category of the sublime and problematizing its gender politics.