Seminar

Romanticism and Modernism are the two isms spanning the long turns of their respective centuries: 1789-1830 and 1880-1920. These periods may look like matching halves of a long history, but any understanding of the connectedness of the two historical periods is largely unformed and still unwritten in the literary and cultural criticism of both eras. The truth of that connective story motivates the narrative of this course. A totality of cultural history comes not through literature alone but in its conjunction with the arts of music and painting and a historically informed understanding of the politics. A special focus on the poetry in the literature and a prioritizing of revolution in political history will locate the main points of overlap and, in the end, offer the coordinates of an understanding of relationship and difference across the two periods and, more than that interconnectedness, the beginnings of a history altogether different to the existing ones. Call-and-answer is a rough formatting for the dialogue we wish to begin as we listen to the cultural texts of these two spots of crisis time, the two isms of their consecutive centuries echoing ahead and answering back. From the French Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars; from the later 19th century through the Great War into Revolutions not only in Russia after the 1914 war but also inside that war: these are the circumstantial parallels that establish the ground for comparative analysis in the historical force fields these two periods join in forming. Our topical locations include Feminism, Race and Empire, Poetry and the People, Poetry and Revolution, Experimental Poetics, the Gesamtkuntswerk or Total Work of Art as a utopian project and dystopian event, and the historicity of classical, romantic, modernist, and popular music. Our artists include Coleridge, Mina Loy, Mary Wollstonecraft, Gertrude Stein, Wordsworth, Pound, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, Wyndham Lewis and William Blake, Richard Wagner
Course Attributes:

Seminar

ENGLISH LITERATURE 5651

Section 01