American Romanticism

“All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.”
Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, 115

This graduate course offers a focused survey of romantic and transcendentalist writings during what is conventionally known as the period of American Romanticism. Students will be introduced to the literary and philosophical currents of the period, with a specific eye towards exploring the entangled connections between nature, thought, spirit, and aesthetic experience. We’ll consider how different modes of expression such as science, philosophy, poetry, analogy, and figurative language attempt to disentangle and delineate the complex interaction of embodied minds with art and nature. While romantic writers share a commitment to the primacy of aesthetics, we’ll consider how each carves an “original relation to the universe” that lends itself to close reading and comparative study. 

We’ll begin the course by exploring the continuities and discontinuities between American Puritan, Enlightenment, and Romantic modes of expression in Jonathan Edwards and Charles Brockden Brown. We’ll then consider the transcendentalist essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, including his manifesto Nature, reading them as both a stimulus and a foil to his fellow contemporaries such as Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allen Poe, and Frederick Douglass. We’ll also explore the landscape aesthetics of the Hudson River School, investigating the connections between visual art, poetry, and the natural environment. Throughout our travels, we’ll also locate these artists in a transatlantic context, exploring how their respective aesthetics were informed by philosophical and scientific ideas found in Locke, Kant, Burke, Goethe, and Humboldt. The course will culminate in an extended reading of Melville’s Moby Dick and conclude with a comparative reading of the poetic scales of Whitman and Dickinson. Course requirements include active participation in discussion, a class presentation, a reading journal, a short critical analysis, and a conference paper.

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose & Poetry
Margaret Fuller, The Essential Margaret Fuller 
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Edgar Allan Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave
Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The Whale