Romantic Matter(s): Subjects & Objects

Catalog description

Rather than focusing on the self and its transcendent imagination traditionally central to Romantic studies, this class explores objects, bodies, and things and their emotional, material affects in the production of the subject and the pursuit of love and desire. It considers how the subject (the lyric I and its self-affirming eye/gaze) that takes central stage in the Romantic period cannot be separated from the objects it claims to perceive. The course examines the complexity of agency through a study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary, political, philosophical, and scientific writers imaginings of the entangled relations of subject and object, mind and body, reason and emotion, human and nonhuman.