The Peculiar Romanticism of the English Situationists

In the late 1960s, a succession of English activists undertook an Anglicisation of the programme of the Continental avant-garde group, the Situationist International (1957–1972). These English Situationists faced a longstanding difficulty in translating such activity into an English idiom: an Anglophonic scepticism about so-called ‘intellectualism’. The paper argues that the English Situationists thus worked to amplify the resonances between the Situationist project and a vernacular tradition of English Romantic poetry. It offers a ‘heretically’ literary-critical reading of Guy Debord alongside Wordsworth, and explores how the English Situationists attempted to ‘re-radicalise’ literary Romanticism.