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English 352a |
Stephen Finley |
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MW 12:30-2:00 |
HU III |
This seminar will begin by posing a series of fundamental questions about romantic poems, beginning with Heidegger's essay of 1946, "What Are Poets For?" At the outset of that essay Heidegger turns to Holderlin's question from "Brot and Wein": " . . . and what are poets for in a destitute time"? Somewhat later in the meditation Heidegger defines his sense of poetry's response to destitution: "To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy." All these terms need investigation, to be sure, "destitute," "trace," "fugitive gods," "world's night," "the holy." This seminar will operate roughly in this fashion. We will try to consider major statements that philosophers and theorists (including the poets themselves) have made about romantic poetry, and we will take the time needed to understand both the manner of address to the poems and the way both poems and address are transformed in the interchange.
Readings in the course will be drawn from four principal romantic careers: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. The course as actually taught, in Fall term 2003, will be responsive to student need or interest and may, include, as well, substantial study of Coleridge, Scott and Carlyle. Coleridge and Carlyle provide the direct links to German philosophy, and to the interface between early and later 19th-century Romanticism, that is between what we often think of as "the Romantic period" proper (1798-1832) and the subsequent Victorian age. There will two harshly competing models of understanding throughout the seminar, one ontological or existential (as suggested in my Heideggerian opening above) and the other historical, concerned to situate the poetry in its time of revolution and world war and to question packaged models of address to the poems based on American literary criticism which has often been either willfully unhistorical and iconic, both in its formalist and de-formalist phases, or constrained by its own form of romantic ideology. Students in the course will be urged to find their own mode of reconciliation or its lack between romanticism as the poetry of being or the poetry of history. It should be noted that this last dichotomy is crudely reductive, and one hopes that such reductions will be severely tried by the conduct of the seminar. Such conduct, as exemplified by Stanley Cavell in the title of one of his essays, might be defined as "in quest of the ordinary."
If "being" and "history" are allowed to stand for different congeries of interest in the course, then our third term must be "nature." The romantic imagination and reproduction of nature (literally of landscape) will be an additional concern of the course, and we will study from time to time the contemporary images, not least by Turner and Constable, of the English and European landscapes which the poems traverse and invoke. We will also take note, of course, of Blake's own work as a graphic artist of the highest significance, and we will read his work, where possible, in facsimile of his own self-produced "visionary books."
Class requirements: Several shorter writing assignments, including brief responses to poems and to theoretical interventions, and one longer seminar essay of 12-15 pages toward the end of term. Class presentations will be required of all seminar participants.
Texts list (partial):
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper
Colophon, 1971).
Blake's Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary L. Johnson and John E. Grant (Norton Critical
Edition, 1979).
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (Norton Critical Edition, 1979).
William Wordsworth, "The Ruined Cottage," a reconstructed text from mss. (by xerox)
William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (Norton Critical Edition, 1977).
Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. McSweeney and Sabor (Oxford UP, 2000).
Stanley Cavell, "In Quest of the Ordinary," from Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Eaves and Fischer (Cornell UP, 1986).
Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement" and "Shelley Disfigured" from The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Columbia UP, 1984).
Thomas McFarland, "Fragmented Modalities and the Criteria of Romanticism," from Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, 1981).
Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago UP, 1985), selected chapters.
Anne K. Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (Indiana UP, 1988), selected essays.
Arden Reed, ed., Romanticism and Language (Cornell UP, 1984), selected essays.
Classic essays, as expected, from M. H. Abrams (from Natural Supernaturalism [1971]), Harold Bloom (Romanticism and Consciousness [1971], The Visionary Company [1971], and The Ringers in the Tower [1971]), Northrop Frye (from Fearful Symmetry [1947, 1969]), and Geoffrey Hartman (from Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 [1971], The Fate of Reading [1975], and The Unremarkable Wordsworth [1987]).
*Enrollment is limited to 15