• About Carmen Faye Mathes

    Carmen Faye Mathes is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. Carmen studies Romantic aesthetics and the poetry of expressive let-down in William Wordsworth, Keats, Hölderlin and Goethe. Her dissertation asks how disappointing poetry reflects or responds to principles of aesthetic apprehension in Romantic-era Britain and Germany. Carmen's blog, the academic romantic, is a rich resource and features interviews with contemporary Canadian poets.

    http://www.theacademicblogspot.blogspot.com

    On the Secondary Source That Changed My Approach to Teaching Keats

    by  • December 12, 2012 • Pedagogy • 0 Comments

    In 2002, Charles Rzepka published a paper that brings critical attention to the footnote usually attached to John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”: Keats’s mentor Charles Cowden Clarke introduced him to Homer in the robust translation of the Elizabethan poet George Chapman. They read through the night, and Keats walked home at...

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    On Work-Life Balance

    by  • October 5, 2012 • Student Life • 0 Comments

    I forgot about September like good food forgets about butter. Oh, it was there. Wouldn’t have been good otherwise. I just didn’t notice how delightful it was until it’s gone. Now I’m craving late summer warmth and autumnal beginning-of-the-school-year hopefulness and its over, carried away by Rocky Mountain snowcaps and rapidly diminishing morning sunlight....

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    Reflections on NASSR 2012

    by  • August 19, 2012 • Conference Digests • 2 Comments

    I’m on the train, heading in the direction of Germany, with Lake Neuchâtel slipping by in gray-blue early morning light. The experience of “Romantic Prospects” has been saturated by landscape. From the window of our student housing accommodation each morning the Swiss Alps marched sharply around the lake, appearing to advance and retreat with...

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    Some Light Relief, or: Richardson’s Pamela is an Au Pair in 2012

    by  • May 7, 2012 • Fun, Reading, Uncategorized • 0 Comments

    "A Moment" by Vancouver artist Drew Young

    It’s May! And that means that a lot of us academics are taking a deep, post-end-of-term-marking breath, and treating ourselves to the smallest of little vacations… a mini-vaycay, a staycation, an excursion, or what I have recently learned Germans call an Ausflug. In keeping with the theme of respite, here is a little light...

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    On Creature Comforts

    by  • April 8, 2012 • Fun, Research, Student Life • 0 Comments

    James Harriet calls cats the “connoisseurs of comfort,” which is perhaps why so many academics are cat-lovers. Like having Of Grammatology on your nightstand, having a cat close at hand reminds you what it would be like to move through the world expressing yourself utterly as you see fit. There is an inverse relationship...

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    On Being Exchanged

    by  • March 12, 2012 • Profession, Student Life • 0 Comments

    “Is it okay?” asks the German waitress who’s just served me sparkling water (1.70 €) instead of tap water. Of course it’s okay! By all means, take my change in Euros while I negotiate my personal existential crisis with regards to the gold standard of higher education. What am I doing here? Cloistered in...

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