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Global Blake: In Conversation with Jared S. Richman – ‘Blake’s Visionary Temporalities: Disability and Form in Milton: A Poem’
June 2, 2023 @ 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM CDT
Blake’s Visionary Temporalities: Disability and Form in Milton: A Poem
While eschewing the potential limits of human perception, William Blake’s poetic vision is remarkable for its commitment to the materiality of human form and sensuality. In fact, the very corporeality of Blake’s metaphorical expression insists that we understand his vision of human experience as essentially and necessarily mediated through the body. Such devotion extends equally to his expansive understanding and expression of temporality. For, as he notes, “all the great / Events of Time start forth and are conceiv’d in such a Period, / Within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery.” The essay delineates Blake’s alternative temporalities by interrogating his construction of non-normative embodiment and the senses in Milton: A Poem (1804). Blake’s approach to time, I argue, opens new ontological possibilities for a critical disability framework of Romantic production especially with regard to corporeal variability for both poet and reader.
JR (Jared S. Richman)
Dr. Jared S. Richman is associate professor and associate chair in the Department of English at Colorado College where he teaches courses on 18th-century literature, British Romanticism, book history and materiality, critical disability studies, radicalism, the Gothic tradition, literary and visual satire, and comics and graphic narrative. Professor Richman’s work has appeared in such journals as European Romantic Review, Essays in Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Studies in Romanticism, and Disability Studies Quarterly. He has published on the works of Milton and Blake, the fiction of Smith, the poetry of Seward, and on Shelley’s Frankenstein. His next book project, from which his talk is derived, traces the relationship between nascent elocutionary theories of the Enlightenment and disability in Anglo-American culture.
