Time: October 13, 13:30-15:30
Place：Room 225, Yang Yongman Building, Minhang Campus, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Speaker ：Seán Hand（University of Warwick）
Abstract
This talk explores how successive generations have reinterpreted John Keats to reflect their own cultural, philosophical, and environmental anxieties. Rather than asking what Keats's poems definitively mean, it traces a critical and creative evolution across five distinct lenses: Character (Walter Jackson Bate), Form (Helen Vendler), Transcendence (Charles Taylor), Ecology (Jonathan Bate), and Catastrophe (through the lens of contemporary poet Jorie Graham). Focusing on the great 1819 odes—Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn—the lecture examines how Keats’s central concept of "negative capability" has shifted from an expression of humanistic strength and formal mastery into a radical poetics of vulnerability and exposure. Ultimately, the talk argues that Keats’s enduring power in our current era of technological and ecological crisis lies not in providing resolutions, but in his disciplined refusal to falsify experience by resolving uncertainty too quickly.
Speaker Profile
Professor Seán Hand is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick. He holds degrees from the universities of Oxford (M.A. Oxon, D. Phil.) and Warwick (MBA, D.Litt.), and an executive qualification from INSEAD. He is a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques and a member of the Academia Europæa. He is a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has written, edited or translated 13 books and special issues; published 62 articles, chapters and reports; and delivered over 100 papers and lectures.