Department of English, NCCU

 Dr. Chris Murray will deliver the 33rd EARN public lecture, titled "Seeing Ghosts: Coleridge, Ferriar, and Keats" on Friday, 25 March, 2022 online. All are welcome. 

Title: Seeing Ghosts: Coleridge, Ferriar, and Keats

Speaker: Dr. Chris Murray (Literary Studies, Monash University)  

Chair: Dr Li-hsin Hsu (English, NCCU)

Time: March 25 2022, Friday 13:10-16:00

Venue: Online (if you are intrested in registering for the event, please contact Dr Hsu Li-hsin / hsulihsin@yahoo.com for further details).

Abstract:

On a chance meeting in 1819, Samuel Taylor Coleridge told John Keats about his theory of double touch. In dialogue with physician and author John Ferriar, Coleridge hypothesized that ghost-sightings occur when the mind articulates disease as strong imagery. Both writers used literature, particularly Hamlet, as a source of evidence for their psychological speculations. Coleridge’s double-touch theory pervades his notebooks and his lectures on drama. His verbal account of double touch provided Keats with a new means to explore the supernatural in narrative verse. Hence double touch receives its most significant literary treatment in Keats’s compositions over the weeks following his conversation with Coleridge. In particular, "La Belle Dame sans Merci" proceeds from an impulse to parody Coleridge to a serious exploration of double-touch. Conversely, Coleridge’s claim to have foretold Keats’s death is influenced by the double-touch theory and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", with which he associates the ghostly younger poet.

Bio:

Chris Murray is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. His books include Tragic Coleridge (2013), China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome: Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793-1938 (2020) and a memoir, Crippled Immortals: Shaolin Enlightenment on a Singapore High-Rise (2018). At present he is editing a collection on Religion in Irish culture for Cambridge University Press.