Comparative Literature Fall 2006
CMLT C-333 (26003)
Romanticism
Prof. Eyal Peretz ,  TR 9:30-10:45
*CSB and A&H credit*
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Madness, blindness, the dark abysses. The haunting of ghosts, a
sublime love without limit, the infinite powers of the imagination.
The autonomy of the human self, the rights of the genius, the
privilege of the artist. The heroic fight for freedom, bloody
political revolutions, the self transforming itself and singing
itself. The quest for the natural, technological monstrosities, the
insistence and resistance of childhood. These are some of the most
striking images that the era called Romanticism has bequeathed us,
images that still demand our attention and our reflection, that
still seem to shape much of our understanding of ourselves and of
our world, for better or for worse. Yet what is it that unifies
these images, if there is such a thing, what is it that warrants the
gesture of unification implied in the attempt to encompass them all,
and perhaps encompass our world with them, with the single
concept “Romantic”? It is this question that will guide this course.
We will take as our starting point the oft-repeated claim that
Romanticism would not have been possible without the Kantian
revolution of philosophy, a claim which, whether historically
accurate or not, implies that Kantianism can help us articulate
together the many gestures we today understand as Romantic. We will
thus take off from an examination of several major moments in
Kantian philosophy and then move on to interrogate five major genres
whose rise has been associated with Romanticism - the lyric poem,
the autobiographical confession, the gothic novel, the philosophical
fragment, the essay in literary theory – with the hope of achieving
by the end of the course a more unified vision of that fundamental
era which is Romanticism.

Readings include: Rousseau, Kant, Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling,
Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley,
Ann Radcliffe