Course description

As a literary and philosophical movement, Romanticism is often characterized as a reaction to the Enlightenment: if the Enlightenment trumpeted its belief in the power of empirical observation and rational thought, Romanticism turned inward, exploring the psychology of emotion, and took flight in search of transcendental idealism. Poetry by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Shelley would seem to prove this claim—until you begin to notice the deep and abiding interest these poets, and most of their contemporaries, had in the material world. Objects—from stones to flowers to decaying bodies—mattered deeply to Romantic poets, and as these authors divulge, objects structure our experience of the world and our conceptions of ourselves, even as they resist our efforts to order and control them.  Through poems both familiar and strange, we will consider how and why material, everyday things provide the foundation for Romantic-era politics, aesthetics, and transcendental poetics. Poems will be supplemented by readings in contemporary prose and modern criticism on the function of objects in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and culture.