About

Orrin Wang is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and an Affiliate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland. His research specializes in the study of Romanticism and theory, with a particular interest in how these discourses converge and their implications for modernity. Wang's first book, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory, explores this convergence, and his subsequent work, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History, examines how Romantic and post-Romantic narratives of sensation and sobriety express this relationship. He has written on figures such as P.B. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Wollstonecraft, Dacre, Kant, Derrida, and Zizek, and also studies and teaches the gothic genre. His latest book, Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation and the Cut, published in 2022 as part of Fordham University's Lit Z series, addresses Romanticism and media studies and was shortlisted for the Marilyn Gaull Prize. Wang is the editor of Frankenstein in Theory and the General Editor of Romantic Circles. He received the Keats Shelley Association of America's Distinguished Scholar Award in 2021. Currently, he is working on a project that explores the connection of fantasy and the death drive in the works of Keats, Tennyson, and N.K. Jemisin.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• History
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Art
• Library science
• Economic history
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Classics
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Techno-Magism

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media, both the print, pictorial art, and theater of that era as well as communicative technologies invented afterward, including photography, film, video, and digital screens.

  PublisherDOI

• Techno-Magism, Coleridge’s Mariner , and the Sentence Image

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  One way to understand techno-magism, a term intimately connected to Romanticism, is as a technology that acknowledges the perceptual and existential bar between what works and how it works. This becomes a particularly intense matter for the question of cause and effect, or more radically, how something might come out of nothing. One approach to this question would be to think it through the dialectic, something Jacques Rancière’s idea of the sentence image speaks to when confronted with the artistic problem of montage. However, a reading the gloss of Coleridge’s <italic>Rime of the Ancient Mariner</italic> as an app suggests a more catachrestic techno-magism of meaning and action, which now cannot be realized as the consequence of the dialectical interplay between cause and effect. Of the same philosophical genealogies underwriting ideas of film montage, the poetic montage in Coleridge’s speaks to a more volatile notion of something coming from nothing, where the nothing of environmental precariousness—the Mariner’s ocean—is not so simply subsumed into the positivity of meaning or identity.

  PublisherDOI

• Prometheus Unbound and Commemorative Thought

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The technology of commemoration becomes unsettled when asked to commemorate the future. The radical indeterminacies inherent in that proposition comment upon the debate between praxis and theory formulated by Adorno, where praxis can best be approximated by theory. The challenges of that assertion underwrite our understanding of Percy Shelley and his lyric drama, <italic>Prometheus Unbound</italic>. Both Shelley and Prometheus emit a queer detumescence that is not the failure of praxis but theory as a register of the future’s alterity. Shelley’s work is also suffused with a revolutionary pleasure that contrasts with his other piece written at the same time, <italic>The Cenci</italic>. The self-aware, intentional language of <italic>Prometheus</italic> turns that pleasure into the stately rave concluding Act IV. It is also the language of theory performed by Asia’s interrogation of Demogorgon, where much is explained, and nothing and everything happens. In Asia theory happens, in a techno-magistic manner that belies the calculable metrics of praxis.

  PublisherDOI

• Play Time

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A comparison of Jane Austen’s <italic>Mansfield Park</italic>, Canto III of Byron’s <italic>Don Juan</italic>, and Mary Shelley’s <italic>Frankenstein</italic> reveals the particular <italic>playtime</italic> of modernity, the Romantic chronotope of the non-sovereign, the problematic of a heterotopic time of theater in whose wake we still inhabit. In this comparison unsupervised play is realized as a rebellious mimesis, alarming in the daemonic youth in Austen and embraced, though also complicated by commodification, in the acting-out of revolution by the youth in Byron; and then as a cathected form of screen viewing in Mary Shelley. In Shelley the creature’s viewing of the De Laceys upends the social risks and attractions mimesis carries in Austen and Byron, providing a riposte to one belief in the New Materialism that we can do away with the subject-object divide, insofar as that divide is the primal cut of difference, a structural incommensurability from which any contemporary politics or materialism comes.

  PublisherDOI

• After Life

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This essay defamiliarizes the idea that Byron’s closet drama, <italic>Manfred</italic>, epitomizes Romantic solipsism by associating it with theories of the <italic>Umwelt</italic> developed by the twentieth-century biologist Jacob von Uexküll. Through the <italic>Umwelt</italic> the mental theater of Manfred becomes a film experience that dislodges human being from its hierarchical position as the phenomenal apex of creaturely existence. Yet Byron’s work and its own afterlife also anticipate the post-human as a terrain whose meanings are, if not completely corralled, magnetized around a return to the problem of the human, as well as, the question of capital. The post-human is not a transcendence of the incommensurate, something the relationship of <italic>Manfred</italic> to <italic>Hamlet</italic> also says about the techno-magistic, catachrestic nature of historical difference and identity.

  PublisherDOI

• Techno-Magism

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  An introduction to how the concept of techno-magism argues for an approach to mediation based more on the aporias of figure than the dialectic. Noting a lacuna in John Guillory’s argument about mediation and media, the book sees how both ideas can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction—an unavoidable notion for anyone trying to think the works of Romanticism and media studies together. That said, the theoretical probings in <italic>Techno-Romanticism</italic> do bear the historical moment of their writing, the second decade of this millennium, where so much of thought and planetary existence labors under the latest phase of late capitalism, oligarchic capital. The Romantic engagement with media explored here is thus not simply relegated to various mediums of the Romantic era but also involves other media technology of the twentieth and twenty-first century, an anachronistic if not presentist dynamic illuminated by William Benjamin’s notion of the constellation, one assumption underlying a viewing of James Whale’s 1931 film <italic>Frankenstein</italic> that also explains the techno-magistic idea of the cut deployed in this book.

  PublisherDOI

• About the Author

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chthonic Michael

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Land art like Robert Smithson’s <italic>Spiral Jetty</italic> asserts an auto-chthonic existence whereby sexual difference is erased and beings come from an earth that is one, never two. Land art also asks to be photographed, creating an archive of images that secures a totalizing identity out of such photography, much like the structuralism theorized by Lévi-Strauss promised, and arguments for big data in the humanities claim to realize. Wordsworth’s poem, <italic>Michael</italic>, contains a ruined sheepfold that like the auto-chthonic character of land art gestures toward a unitary sense of being unriven by sexual difference as the contract of patriarchal entailment while also functioning as a cutting wound that testifies to that contract’s failure. The poem also images the sheepfold not through a digital archiving but as a film close-up, where the image contains the whole of its viewing encounter. Wordsworth’s sheepfold is the split between nature and culture that resists Lévi-Strauss’s wish to make transparent the unconscious deposit of memory and difference in Freud; it is also the fissure that belies contemporary triumphalist arguments for big data in the humanities.

  PublisherDOI

• Techno-Magism

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • History

  <italic>Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism</italic> explores how British Romantic literature abuts against and is organized around a topos of both print and non-print media. These themes and motifs involve not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, either during the Victorian age or sometime during the twentieth century, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. The awareness in <italic>Techno-Magism</italic> of this proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. In a word, both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media in the eight essays collected here. The essays in <italic>Techno-Magism</italic> think that relationship through the non-dialectical, catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, and further organize themselves around two other ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Bearing the historical moment of their writing, the second decade of this millennium, where so much of thought and planetary existence labors under the latest phase of late capitalism, oligarchic capital, the essays also explore the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jerry Aline Flieger

  Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

  3 shared

• Maurice Charney

  3 shared

• Peter Berek

  Amherst College

  3 shared

• Brenda R. Silver

  2 shared

• Thomas Jay Lynn

  2 shared

• John F. Crossen

  Mansfield University

  2 shared

• Stuart Y. McDougal

  2 shared

• Nancy K. Miller

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize (2011)
• Marilyn Gaull Prize (2022)
• Keats Shelley Association of America's Distinguished Scholar…