ASECS Annual Meeting
Portland, Oregon
April 1-3, 2027
“Intertextual Sympathies: Remediating Affect”
Sponsored by the Lessing Society (Session ID: CA16)
Until recently, two models of intertextuality have dominated literary studies. On the one hand, there is the question of influence, in which scholars trace the provenance of allusions in one text back to earlier precedents to elucidate the dramatic interplay of authors as characters in agonistic or psychoanalytic scenes (e.g., Harold Bloom). On the other hand, postmodernist scholars see the reverberations between texts as constitutive features of writing: texts consist in endless chains of disembodied echoes (e.g., Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva). In a haunting new study of shared grief in texts dealing with the Shoah, however, Simone Stirner works with conceptions from Alex Brostoff, Renate Lachmann, and Chana Kronfeld to propose an alternative approach to intertextuality that “shifts the focus to the ways texts participate in […] a shared structure of feeling” (Poetic Grief, Fordham UP, 2026, pg. 28). This relational intertextuality is also a suggestive model for understanding how bodily emotions are mediated and transmitted between texts in the eighteenth century.
This panel invites participants attentive to how echoes between texts are akin to shared feelings between people. In the eighteenth century, the transmission of emotions was sometimes compared to the sympathetic vibrations of overtones in string instruments (cf. David Hume, Adam Smith). This kind of participatory interaction is also a striking metaphor for relational intertextuality. G.E. Lessing, for instance, performs the remediation of emotions in his aesthetic tract, Laokoon, in which compassion (Mitleid) is repeatedly translated between genres and media. Building on studies of sympathy and emotion in the eighteenth century (e.g., Fritz Breithaupt, Aleksondra Hultquist, Lynn Hunt, Glen McGilllivray, Julia Weber, et al.), we can begin to flesh out embodied conceptions of both intertextuality and emotions that inform each other and lead to a better understanding of the physical transmission of emotions and texts between languages, cultures, and genres in eighteenth-century discourses.
Topics could include but are not limited to:
Intertextuality as empathetic action
Sympathy as an intertextually constructed phenomenon
Emotional contagion between texts
Reproducing passions in texts
Remediating affect (adaptations of emotional representations in different genres: e.g., from drama to novel; opera, visual art, philosophical tract, etc.)
Circulation of emotions between texts and discourses
Textual representations of emotional identification with fictional characters (e.g., between J.M.R. Lenz’s Hofmeister, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Rousseau’s Julie)
Case studies in intertextual sympathies: e.g., Lessing and Adam Smith; Mendelssohn and Rousseau; Wollstonecraft and Rousseau; Kant and Hume; Mozart/Schikaneder and Wieland; Garrick and Diderot; von La Roche and Goethe; etc).
Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short CV via the ASECS submission portal by September 18, 2026. Session ID: CA16.
See the ASECS Annual Meeting website for more information. The following links may also be of particular interest:
Click here to see a List of Sessions with descriptions that you can apply to (Session Titles are listed on the submission form)
Important: All submissions need to be submitted through the platform. Please do not send any submissions directly to the session chairs
Submission Instructions (with illustrated step-by-step instructions)
Submit your individual abstract here.
We look forward to receiving your submission. For questions about the panel, please reach out to the session chair Ellwood Wiggins (wiggins1@uw)