Romanticism was an inter- and transnational literary-philosophical project. In this lecture course, we will trace the most important and influential literary and philosophical contributions from Jena to the Lake District and from London to New England. We will read selected works by German, British, and American authors such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe. We will also devote some time to lesser-known authors and women writers (two groups which, unfortunately, tend to overlap). And we will complement these readings with Romanticism’s reflections on poetic, aesthetic, and overall philosophical issues ranging from the romantic understanding of aesthetic experience and the sublime to discussions of the role of the imagination in human cognition to the concept of the genius to theorizations of the human relation to nature. We will end by scrutinizing some contemporary continuations and repercussions of the romantic project, particularly with respect to recent developments in the theoretical humanities concerned with human-nonhuman relations (the nonhuman turn), nature and climate change (ecotheory), and the constitution and status of the human subject (posthumanism).
- Enseignant·e: Ridvan Askin