Sophie Thomas

Toronto Metropolitan University, English, and Graduate Program in Communications and Culture, Faculty Member

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Books by Sophie Thomas

Museums in Literature: Fictionalising Museums, World Exhibitions, and Private Collections

by Anne Chassagnol, Sophie Thomas, Bénédicte Jarrasse, Nolwenn Corriou, David LABREURE, James R Weldon, Sylvaine Faure-Godbert, and Lavinia Torti

Brepols, 2022

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Romanticism and visuality: fragments, history, spectacle

Papers by Sophie Thomas

The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama

Semiotext(e)/ Architecture

Border/Lines, 1993

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Teaching Romanticism and Visual Culture

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2010

To teach Romantic period literature and visual culture together is to approach the subject in a w... more To teach Romantic period literature and visual culture together is to approach the subject in a way that responds to the broader cultural preoccupations proper to that literature. It is of course only one possible interdisciplinary approach, and a strong case could made for readings of Romantic texts that are attentive to history, politics, the natural sciences, sexuality and so on. I will argue below that the relationship of Romantic literature to questions of visuality is a close and productive one, but I would like to begin by addressing the more general problem of disciplines and their boundaries — or, to put it differently, how one thinks of interdisciplinarity and its potential gains. Interdisciplinarity has been as often contested for offering conceptual support to intellectual alliances that are more convenient than necessary, as praised for enabling more subtle and complete understanding. However, interdisci-plinarity responds to the inherent limitations of disciplines not simply by making connections and fostering dialogue between them, or by allowing more (or more probing) questions to be asked than a given discipline may allow on its own, but by opening up a potentially “undisciplined” space in the areas in between.1 To some extent, this space is what Roland Barthes refers to when he argues that interdisciplinary study is not about confronting “already constituted disciplines”; rather, “Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one” (Barthes 1986: 72).

Aids to friendship: coleridge and the inscription of the friend

European Romantic Review, Dec 1, 2003

THE FIGURE of the friend in Coleridge’s poems is often no friend at all, but a figure of absence ... more THE FIGURE of the friend in Coleridge’s poems is often no friend at all, but a figure of absence or loss, who more precisely invokes something (an aspect of the self, or of the poet’s life) of which he feels he has been dispossessed. The friend may pose as an absent other, but in several cases, the friend is clearly inscribed as self-identical, and positioned in an uncanny relation to the poet’s own death. The figure of the friend is thus closely related to memory, or memorialization—no stranger to inscriptions, and epitaphs. The inherent juxtaposition this suggests of narcissism and death accounts, perhaps, for some of the metaphors Coleridge deploys, metaphors involving reflection and spectrality, that elucidate both the place and function of the “friend” in his poetics. There is, meanwhile, a link with the project of The Friend on this point. Coleridge proposes that the function of his new periodical will be (among other things) to offer “comforts and consolations”— compensation, in short, for unspecified losses, the losses of life or of living—and a reflective antidote to “speculative gloom.” This paper will examine the inscription of the “friend” in a range of Coleridge’s poems, including some, such as “A Tombless Epitaph,” that were first published in The Friend. It is, however, the very act of writing the “friend” that not only compensates, but also facilitates the transformation the poems represent from an objective other to a self-identical subject.

“Things on holiday”: collections, museums, and the poetics of unruliness

European Romantic Review, Apr 1, 2009

Department of English, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Taylor and Francis GERR_A_384214.sgm 10... more

Coleridge : the aesthetics of the fragmentary and the romantic imagination

Recent work on the fragment, prompted in part by the disruption of totalities in contemporary the... more Recent work on the fragment, prompted in part by the disruption of totalities in contemporary theories of writing and textuality, has returned the fragment to legitimacy in literary studies. Literary critics have begun to hail the fragment as the quintessential Romantic "form"-- one which, as D.F. Rauber claims, embodies Romantic ideals and aims more fully than any other. The fragment (in unmistakably high Romantic terms) is said to figure forth the infinite and the indeterminate in a finite, discrete, sequential medium--engaging, furthermore, in an organicist relation with the whole of which it partakes. The fragment, like the symbol or the organic part, is thought to be capable of indicating or implying the absent whole. By identifying itself with the organic part (or being so identified by readers), the fragment even usurps the ideal place of the whole by offering access to its essential nature--access that is, ironically, less materially compromised by the possibility of fragmentation than if it had become a complete whole. In this way the fragment comes to be seen as the most appropriate signifier of sublime, visionary excess--as the best possible representation of the impossibly ambitious work that the mind aspires to but is unable to sustain or carry out. This study examines the problem of the fragment in Romantic literature and poetic theory, and investigates the reconstruction of "Romanticism" through the phenomenon of the fragment in contemporary literary criticism. The Romantic canon is highly susceptible to reconstruction along "fragmentary" lines since so many of its central texts are fragments in at least one sense. In spite of the broad nature of the problem (a pervasive aesthetic and epistemological difficulty), this study brings two specific areas (romantic aesthetics and current literary criticism) to bear on three major, fragmentary, Coleridge texts: Biographia Literaria , "Kubla Khan," and "Christabel." In each case, arguments are made for or against the "unity" of the work. For Biographia Literaria , these turn on the viability of Coleridge's theory of imagination; in "Kubla Khan," on the relation of the preface to the poem; and in "Christabel," on its truncated two-part structure.

The Fragment in Ruins

‘Shadows of a Magnitude’

Vital Matter(s): Shelley, Herder, and Sculpture

European Romantic Review, May 4, 2018

The winter of 1819-20, which Percy Shelley spent in Florence, coincided with a period of extraord... more The winter of 1819-20, which Percy Shelley spent in Florence, coincided with a period of extraordinary literary productivity. But in spite of the time Shelley was clearly spending at his desk, he devised a plan to carefully study the sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery. This undertaking resulted in a set of descriptive notes, containing sixty or so entries, that aim to capture-in the act of observation-the vital energy caught by human forms in stone. This article examines how Shelley's engagement with sculpture was informed by a way of thinking about materiality and ideality in the artwork that intersects suggestively with Herder's writings on the subject. Both writers, close readers of Winckelmann, praise the products of Greek antiquity for their formal, ideal beauty and living qualities-and ground their observations in a nuanced distinction between painting and sculpture, and in Herder's case, sight and touch. Shelley's notes on such famous statues as the Venus Anadyomene and the Niobe group, read alongside his ekphrastic poem on a painting of the Medusa, attest to how perception (actively) animates, reciprocally, both subject and object-making sculpture, contra its critics, a fit medium for conveying health, life and motion. In a note written by Mary Shelley on Percy Shelley's poems of 1818, she remarks that: We often hear of persons disappointed by a first visit to Italy. This was not Shelley's case-the aspect of its nature, its sunny sky, its majestic storms, of the luxuriant vegetation of the country, and the noble marble-built cities, enchanted him. The sight of the works of art were full enjoyment and wonder; he had not studied pictures or statues before, he now did so with the eye of taste, that referred not to the rules of schools, but to those of nature and truth. (P. B. Shelley, Complete Works 3: 219) Florence, where the Shelley household settled in October of 1819, was central to this new study, though in fact one of their motives for wintering there that year was Mary Shelley's upcoming confinement. Shelley, during this time, toured Florence, making frequent visits to the Uffizi Gallery. He came up with an ambitious plan, as he put it in a letter to Maria Gisborne, to study it "piecemeal" throughout the winter-intending, through careful attention to the sculpture particularly, to better understand the way in which "that ideal beauty of which we have so intense yet so obscure an apprehension is realized in external forms" (Letters 2: 126). 1 This experience formed the basis for his Notes on Sculptures in

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The Soane after Soane: Housing the Museum

Victorian Review, 2017

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Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Topography 1600-1830. Manchester University Press, 1999. ISBN 0719048052. Price: £16.99

Romanticism on the net, 2001

This is, on the whole, an impressive and resourceful book that takes as its main subject the rhet... more

Seeing Past Rome

Routledge eBooks, Dec 12, 2007

Recent antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) calculations for 28 Si suggest the presence of a ... more Recent antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) calculations for 28 Si suggest the presence of a superdeformed (SD) band with a dominant 24 Mg + α clustering for its configuration, with firm predictions for its location and associated moment of inertia. This motivates a review of the experimental results reported in the literature with a particular focus on 24 Mg(α,γ) studies, as well as on α-like heavy-ion transfer reactions such as 12 C(20 Ne,α) 28 Si. Combining this information for the first time leads to a set of candidate SD states whose properties point to their α-cluster structure and strong associated deformation. Analysis of data from Gammasphere allows the electromagnetic decay of these candidate states to be probed and reveals further supporting evidence for such a structure. This paper appraises this body of information and finds the evidence for an SD band is strong.

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Poetry and Illustration: “Amicable strife”

Romanticism and Visuality

Preface and Acknowledgments List of Illustrations *(Introduction) Regarding Visuality: From the P... more Preface and Acknowledgments List of Illustrations *(Introduction) Regarding Visuality: From the Picturesque to the Panorama *'Shadows of a Magnitude': Keats, Fragments, and Vision * The Fragment in Ruins * Seeing Past Rome: Ruins, History, Museums * Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight * Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double, and the Gothic Subject * Seeing Things ("as they are"): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance * Vision and Revulsion: Shelley, Medusa, and the Phantasmagoria Notes Bibliography Index

Sublimation: Necessity and Impossibility

Introduction: On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum

museum and society, Nov 29, 2019

In a world of escalating claims on public funds-and on the public's attention-museums are increas... more In a world of escalating claims on public funds-and on the public's attention-museums are increasingly under pressure to combine their original functions as sites of cultural knowledge and memory with enhanced strategies for social engagement. In response, museums are finding creative ways to challenge disciplinary divisions and to establish collaborative, teambased projects that involve multiple stakeholders: public, private, academic, and political. 'On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum' began as a two-day event, held in Toronto in October of 2018, that was designed to engage academics, museum administrators, and cultural workers who are developing new, connective ways of engaging with the museum as both an institutional structure and an idea, and who are considering the deeper roles of museums in the history of knowledge and the future of knowledge practices. 1 Through themed conference presentations and roundtables, workshops, and creative exercises, some of which were held in collaboration with the Aga Khan Museum, the event facilitated cultural and disciplinary exchanges that fruitfully inform how we understand museums and their objects. To that end, we invited national and international researchers and museum professionals dedicated to challenging received ideas about knowledge, culture, and disciplinary boundaries. Our participants included directors and curators of national museums with cultural and scientific mandates, as well as academic researchers with a history of parapublic institutional collaboration. The title we chose evokes the encyclopedic tradition that comprised the first texts of pan-disciplinary knowledge in the classical and medieval eras. As a collection of information about the material and immaterial world, the classical encyclopedia had an analogous structure and function to the modern museum: to provide a comprehensive circle of knowledge, wherein all human understanding might be contained, managed, and accessed. These texts formed the root of western collection practices, and as these practices shifted from medieval compiling of texts about the world to modern collecting of materials of the world, concepts of knowledge, truth, value and identity were shifted to the museums and the material objects within them. These concepts constitute the first order of the 'properties' that we wish to consider, but we mean also to raise broader questions of property: of ownership, transmission and territory, of duration and durability, in the face of impermanence and change (which may be material, sociopolitical, and/or historical in nature). These questions of property need to be problematized in the current era of decolonizing, opening up, and pluralizing museums. Early encyclopedic traditions fostered connections between material culture, the natural world, and textual knowledge. Acknowledging these connections also allows us to address the 'poetics' of objects in ways that recognize their dual status as made things (artifacts, poems, museums) but also as things that make knowledge and are formative agents in the development of knowing subjects. Poetics, however, are always culturally and historically determined, and therefore their properties-in all senses of the word-are often contested. The main title of the event also recognizes that objects in and of the museum, as noted above, have various properties that derive from their materiality, their cultural history, and their knowledge-building capacity. Those properties are inseparable from relationships of power: whose property, one might justifiably ask, are they? We approached these questions through the principle of 'collective knowledge,' in the terms of our subtitle, whereby we challenge the historical, disciplinary boundaries of museum cultures (be they scholarly, curatorial, administrative, pedagogical, scientific, artistic or literary). In so doing, our aim was to forge connections between realms usually held apart: the arts and sciences, research and education, Eurocentric and Indigenous knowledges and practices, past and present, and between the academic and the public sphere.

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Collecting, Cultural Memory, and the Regency Museum

Early nineteenth-century Londoners seeking diversion (and perhaps even a little useful instructio... more Early nineteenth-century Londoners seeking diversion (and perhaps even a little useful instruction) were spoilt for choice. In addition to a dizzying array of visual and theatrical entertainments there were a wide variety of exhibitions—of natural history specimens, artworks and antiquities, waxworks and automata, models and mock-ups—all laying claim to their attention (and their pocketbooks). The Regency period in particular saw the formation of a number of significant museums, reflecting the prevailing tendencies—and tensions—in emerging cultures of collection and display. In Piccadilly in 1812, William Bullock unveiled his “London Museum,” purpose-built with a faux-Egyptian facade, which would become a centre for popular commercial exhibitions right through the nineteenth century; in 1813, Sir John Soane moved his extensive collections into his new home at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where they would be constituted as the “House and Museum of Sir John Soane.” Meanwhile, at the rapidly growing British Museum, Lord Elgin’s marbles—the last shipment of which, consisting of 86 large crates, had arrived in London in 1812—finally went on display in 1816.

Introduction – A Tour, a Text, a Body, a Building, a Model: Some (Fore-)words for the Nineteenth-Century Museum

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