Romanticism/Postmodernism: The Question of Literature

Catalog description

This course will read Romanticism as a precursor to our own era of postmodernism. The starting point will be the French Deconstructionist reading of Friedrich Schlegel and his short-lived journal, Athenaeum (1798-1800). As Maurice Blanchot argues, among the many contradictions “out of which romanticism unfolds—contradictions that contribute to making literature no longer a response but a question,” perhaps most significant is that “romantic art, which concentrates creative truth in the freedom of the subject, also formulates the ambition of a total book, a sort of perpetually growing Bible that will not represent but, rather, replace the real.” We will take Blanchot’s insight as our guide in reading an otherwise disparate collection of texts ranging across Romantic time and space. From Germany, besides Schlegel’s aphorisms, we will read Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) and The Golden Pot (1814); from Great Britain, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Byron’s Don Juan (1819), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); from Poland, Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1814); from Russia, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836) and Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1841), and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842); and from the United States, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Along the way, we will periodically depart from the 19th century to emphasize the ways that Romanticism underpins what we take to be our own postmodernist thought. As a response to Don Juan, we will read Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia. Together with Frankenstein, we will read Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story; and will end on a ship- faring note, as we juxtapose Moby Dick with Maggie Nelson’s gender- and genre-bending The Argonauts (2015). 95 Literature Coming of Age in America: Classic American Literature of the 19th Century