I was happy and honored when AnnWierda Rowland invited me to speak about Jonathan Mulrooney’s wonderful Romanticism and Theatrical Experience at the NASSR New Book Panel. I have elsewhere described how Mulrooney’s book provides our best account of the deep connections between the London theaters and an expanding and thoroughly commercialized press; Mulrooney uses a densely contextualized study of the complex business of theatrical reviewing to explore the innovations of Edmund Kean in acting, William Hazlitt in the essay, and John Keats in poetry. Mulrooney attends to the difficulties in maintaining a private life when the commercial press exposes, for example, Kean’s personal affairs to public view; he explains how his three central figures attempt to negotiate a public sphere so dominated by contentious politics and commercial interests that it becomes increasingly difficult to find a self free of the cash nexus and ideology. While Kean struggles to control his sensational life on and off stage, Hazlitt finds in what Mulrooney calls “Romantic occasionalism” (153) a way for self-creation outside a constricted public sphere, and Keats uses a “poetics of interruption” to disrupt and interrogate the present moment (192). Here I want to think through Mulrooney’s occasional Romanticism to question further the relationship between the public and the private, the political and the poetical. In a footnote, Mulrooney contrasts his notion of Romantic occasionalism with Carl Schmitt’s argument that Romanticism secularizes Nicolas Malebranche’s religious occasionalism so that “the romantic subject treats the world as an occasion... for his romantic productivity” (Schmitt 17; qtd. in Romanticism 186n3). In reducing everything to an occasion for the self, Romanticism subjectivizes and aestheticizes all aspects of life, and, more importantly, rejects any event as a cause, except as “the occasio for the adventure, the point of departure for the fanciful game” (Schmitt 98; qtd. in Romanticism 186n3). Mulrooney makes clear his difference from Schmitt’s sense that Romanticism essentially deals in illusions and thus “has no interest in really changing the world” (Schmitt 98; qtd. in Romanticism 186n3). Mulrooney writes, “This subjugation of political consciousness to a radically imagined individuality is counter to my reading of Hazlitt’s, and later Keats’s, occasionalist engagements with history” (Romanticism 186n3). As he later claims for “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the Romantic writing of Keats is “a self-consciously performed historiographical action” (219)—the interruption of an abstract social world of money and politics by a particularized encounter with the world (or by a “mark[ing] [of] events with attention” [“Keats’s 1817 Occasions” 744]) that is precisely what allows us to imagine history, including a different history than the one dominated by commerce and ideology. Mulrooney rejects Schmitt’s reduction of the occasion to the personal, and he also resists what he sees in some historicist work as a reduction of the person to the occasion.

中文翻译：

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乔纳森·穆鲁尼的浪漫主义和戏剧体验

当 AnnWierda Rowland 邀请我在 NASSR 新书小组讨论 Jonathan Mulrooney 美妙的浪漫主义和戏剧体验时，我感到高兴和荣幸。我在别处描述了穆鲁尼的书如何最好地描述了伦敦剧院与不断扩大和彻底商业化的媒体之间的深层联系。穆鲁尼对复杂的戏剧评论业务进行了密集的情境化研究，以探索埃德蒙·基恩在表演方面的创新、威廉·黑兹利特在论文中的创新以及约翰济慈在诗歌方面的创新。当商业媒体曝光基恩的私事时，穆鲁尼关注维持私人生活的困难；他解释了他的三位核心人物如何试图在一个由有争议的政治和商业利益主导的公共领域进行谈判，以至于越来越难以找到一个摆脱金钱联系和意识形态的自我。当基恩努力控制自己在台上台下的轰动生活时，黑兹利特在穆鲁尼所说的“浪漫偶然主义”（153）中找到了一种在狭窄的公共领域之外进行自我创造的方式，济慈则使用“中断诗学”来破坏和询问当下（192）。在这里，我想通过马尔鲁尼偶尔的浪漫主义来思考，进一步质疑公共与私人、政治与诗意之间的关系。在脚注中，Mulrooney 将他的浪漫偶然主义概念与 Carl Schmitt 的论点进行了对比，后者认为浪漫主义将尼古拉斯·马勒布兰奇的宗教偶然主义世俗化，因此“浪漫主义主体将世界视为……为了他的浪漫生产力”（Schmitt 17；qtd. in Romanticism 186n3）。浪漫主义将一切都简化为自我的机会，将生活的方方面面主观化和审美化，更重要的是，拒绝任何事件作为原因，除了“冒险的机会，幻想游戏的出发点”（施密特 98；qtd. in Romanticism 186n3)。穆鲁尼清楚地表明他与施密特的感觉不同，即浪漫主义本质上是在处理幻觉，因此“对真正改变世界没有兴趣”（施密特 98；qtd. in Romanticism 186n3）。穆鲁尼写道，“这种政治意识对激进想象的个性的征服与我对黑兹利特和后来济慈的偶然性历史接触的阅读背道而驰”（Romanticism 186n3）。正如他后来在“希腊瓮上的颂歌”中所说的那样，济慈的浪漫主义写作是“一种自觉地进行的史学行动”（219）——通过与世界的特殊遭遇来中断一个抽象的金钱和政治社会世界（或通过“关注事件的标记”[“Keats's 1817 Occasions” 744]）这正是让我们能够想象历史的原因，包括与商业和意识形态主导的历史不同的历史。穆鲁尼拒绝施密特将场合简化为个人，他也反对他在一些历史主义作品中将人简化为场合的做法。