Lecture 60 in the seminar series organised by the Center for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University took place on 13 October 2026 in Room 225, Yang Yongman Building. Professor Emeritus Seán Hand of the University of Warwick presented the lecture “‘DO I WAKE OR SLEEP?’: Keats, Negative Capability and the Uses of Romanticism”. Associate Professor (Tenure-Track) Tang Yili chaired the event, attended by faculty and students from the School.
Focusing on John Keats, Professor Hand examined how successive generations of scholars reread Keats to respond to cultural, philosophical and environmental anxieties of their times. He analysed the shifting meaning of “negative capability” through Keats’s celebrated 1819 odes: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn. What began as a marker of humanistic strength and formal craft evolved into a poetics of vulnerability and open receptivity. Professor Hand contended that Keats’s work remains vital amid today’s technological and ecological crises not by supplying ready-made answers, but by resisting hasty closure and the distortion of lived experience. His talk combined theoretical contextualisation with close textual analysis to illuminate the continuing relevance of Romantic poetics.
The discussion opened with a commentary by Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) Wang Bowen, who exchanged ideas with Professor Hand. Wang linked Keats’s negative capability to T. S. Eliot’s poetic thought, tracing Keats’s legacy in literary modernism and raising questions about ethical action in ecological emergencies. Audience members then raised rich questions covering the contemporary stakes of negative capability, multiple readings of Keats’s odes, Romanticism’s capacity to address ecological crisis, and literature’s social role. Drawing on Romantic literary history and modern critical theory, Professor Hand offered detailed replies, opening up new avenues for interdisciplinary research on Romantic poetry.
The lecture introduced fresh frameworks for Romantic literary studies, expanded participants’ interdisciplinary outlook, and provided valuable guidance for young researchers designing projects and writing papers. Lecture 60 concluded successfully.
