Professor Ian Balfour
Ian Balfour is Professor of English at York University and a specialist in 18th-century philosophy, British Romantic literature and culture, and critical theory. His publications include Northrop Frye (1988), The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002), and essays on the Romantics (Wordsworth, Blake, Godwin, Inchbald), Walter Benjamin, and popular culture (music, TV, film). He co-edited with Atom Egoyan, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (2004), and with Eduardo Cadava, And Justice For All?: The Claims of Human Rights (a 2004 special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly). He has taught at institutions that include Cornell, Stanford, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, and Williams College.
Professor Balfour's talk, "Pathos, Figure, Freedom: On Some Poetics and Politics in the Discourse of the Sublime,” will engage some key dynamics of the theory and criticism of the sublime clustered around a tension between how this aesthetic mode is sometimes characterized as dependent on the overwhelming of the subject such that he or she is in no position to know or articulate his or her experience of the sublime situation and, at other times, how it is characterized as a vehicle of, or means to, freedom. This plays out differently in some of the canonical and not-so canonical theorists as well as practitioners of literature, including Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Holderlin.
Read the abstract here.
Professor Balfour's talk, "Pathos, Figure, Freedom: On Some Poetics and Politics in the Discourse of the Sublime,” will engage some key dynamics of the theory and criticism of the sublime clustered around a tension between how this aesthetic mode is sometimes characterized as dependent on the overwhelming of the subject such that he or she is in no position to know or articulate his or her experience of the sublime situation and, at other times, how it is characterized as a vehicle of, or means to, freedom. This plays out differently in some of the canonical and not-so canonical theorists as well as practitioners of literature, including Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Holderlin.
Read the abstract here.