350:561

Index # - 75147

Distribution Requirement:  A4

Tuesday – 1:10 p.m.

CCA - 8 Bishop Place

William Galperin

Romanticism and the History of Missed Opportunities

It has long been a commonplace that the Romantic movement is predicated on a sense of loss or belatedness. Beginning with Schiller’s Naive and Sentimental Poetry—with its equation of the modern and the nostalgic—and culminating in British Romanticism’s consolidation in the wake of the French Revolution and its disappointment, Romanticism remains a discourse where even the proleptic and the visionary are regularly construed on the basis of what was or might have been, rather than according to something unprecedented or inconceivable.  This course, then, will explore the “something missed” in the discourse of Romanticism or, more specifically, Romanticism’s embrace of something that had transpired, both as a resource on which to draw as well as something that Romanticism alternately writes out of history into various mythologies, public and private. Readings will include writings by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and Hazlitt that center variously on the French Revolution, both at the time and in retrospect in the course of which the “spirit of the age” (as Hazlitt termed it) was effectively forged. We will then proceed to more generalized accounts of loss primarily in Wordsworth’s major lyrics, where “history” emerges only to evanesce. We will turn next to the question of history per se, in particular to late-eighteenth-century theories of historiography, where the very subject of history writing effectively morphs from the great and the unusual into the ordinary and the social. It is in this context that the Romantic embrace of possibility—however in arrears or disappointed—represents an important detour in which history, far from evaded or overlooked (as new historicists often charge), becomes a bulwark against the regime of probability.  Over and against an increasingly probabilistic way with history, in which change is either gradual or nonexistent, writers of the Romantic period—chiefly Byron, Keats and Austen—devised various strategies of recovery which also double as indices of hope and possibility. These include the real time lyric (Keats’s Odes), in which something passed is made fully present, as well as Byronic digression and Austenian circumstantial detail, which variously oppose the temporal momentum of plot and the ultimately partial historical narrative it serves. The course will conclude with Percy Shelley, with special attention to “The Triumph of Life,” where ordinary life is both a register of despair and an opportunity that is concomitantly missed and unappreciated.

Students will be required to write a one page (single-spaced) response paper each week in addition to a fifteen-page term paper.