GNCS 248 - The Age of Romanticism

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 248) In this course, we consider how the concepts of revolution and the sublime shaped the themes and forms that were central to the Romantic imagination. As heated writings evoking the political sublime were emerging from debates about the French Revolution, young poets were transforming old forms to fathom connections between the sublime in mind and in nature. Revolution and sublime are spaces of formlessness, expansiveness and volatility, the bleeding edges where rules about how we relate to our world and each other break down. We enter these spaces together through the poems and prose of this period, and see how writers sought transformation—for themselves and their writing—through encounters with nature, dreams, intoxication, gothic landscapes, and ghosts. Our survey also marks some of the major political developments of the period, including feminist and abolitionist movements in England. We write frequently, considering how to build informative and revelatory critical arguments out of the observations and oddities each individual text calls forth. Katie Gemmill.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS