350:632                                                                                                

Index # - 52881

Distribution Requirement:  A4

Thursday – 4:30 p.m.  

MU 207  

Colin Jager 

Seminar:  Romanticism and Consciousness

This course will offer an introduction to romantic-era literature, both canonical and non-canonical, poetry, prose, and non-fiction; it will also serve to introduce students to the major themes of romantic criticism during the past forty years: humanism, deconstruction, and historicism.  Our focus will be primarily, though not exclusively, on the question of consciousness and on cognate issues such as emotion, feeling, epistemology, autonomy, and originality. 

I’ve titled this course “Romanticism and Consciousness” after a watershed book in romantic studies, edited by Harold Bloom and published in 1970.  The volume summed up the previous quarter-century’s humanist criticism, which resurrected romanticism as a major object of study within American universities.  With its inclusion of Paul de Man’s essay “The Intentionality of the Romantic Image,” moreover, the volume intimated the deconstructive turn that romantic criticism was about to inaugurate.  What is striking about Romanticism and Consciousness some thirty-five years later, however, is its tacit assumption that literature in general, and romantic literature in particular, offers access to human consciousness itself, and thus to the large conceptual questions that seem so out of fashion now: What is freedom? What does it mean to be human? What do we live for?  Very few of us would now ask such questions, nor assume that literature offered answers to them.

As literary study has turned its attention elsewhere, however, a set of other disciplines, including cognitive science and philosophy of mind, have begun to focus anew on the question of consciousness.  Some of our energy, then, will be devoted to this material; we will investigate possible continuities between literary representations of consciousness and contemporary scientific efforts to locate and/or explain away consciousness.  Some of the questions we shall consider: how do romantic texts narrate consciousness? can romantic anti-Cartesianism be usefully compared to current anti-dualist theories of mind? To what extent does the contemporary division of knowledge (between humanities and sciences, e.g.) inhibit such comparisons? Does it matter that this division took its modern form during the romantic period itself?

This course will continue some of the themes and topics pursued in Jonathan Kramnick’s fall 2006 course on thinking in the eighteenth century.  The “Mind and Culture” working group at the Center for Cultural Analysis will be inviting a number of speakers, from a variety of disciplines, to address the question of consciousness next year; as far as possible, we will coordinate secondary readings with the CCA’s visiting speakers, and I very much hope that students will attend those events.

Readings: major works of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron, DeQuincey, Keats, Tennyson, Marx, and Carlyle; secondary material will include essays by Bloom, Hartman, Abrams, de Man, McGann, Levinson, and contemporary philosophy of mind.