Emily Rohrbach, visiting assistant professor of English, presented a paper at the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society conference at Rutgers University, Oct. 23-25. Exploring the ethical implications of Romantic subjectivity and conceptions of time, her paper, titled "Romantic Surplus," characterized the Romantic sense of time as a teeming present that produces an excess of what can potentially be known, due in part to the way that knowledge of that present rests on an imagined, dark futurity.
In the example of John Keats, this sense of anticipation provides an alternative to a teleological construction of time insofar as Keats's lyric subjectivity suggests that the truth about a final cause toward which the present is tending can emerge only through fiction—one of the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic premises.
In the example of John Keats, this sense of anticipation provides an alternative to a teleological construction of time insofar as Keats's lyric subjectivity suggests that the truth about a final cause toward which the present is tending can emerge only through fiction—one of the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic premises.
