Romanticism Soon

What was Romanticism? What is it now? And what will it be? This class takes as its focus a cluster of texts by Romantic-era authors and thinkers and puts them in dialogue with a series of contemporary poets in order to measure the past, present, and future of Romanticism as both a period designation and a conceptual force that lives on beyond historical determinations. The course will be about the multiple lives and afterlives of Romanticism, studying a brief period of powerful revolutionary disruptions. Our task will be to explore this critical trans-historical and trans-temporal dialogue and ask: What are the social, political, ethical, and aesthetic questions occasioned by these juxtapositions? How do we assess what romanticism means? How and why does it persist—and perhaps disappear—in the art of our own time? Attention may be paid to films (Jarman, Burnett,