Spenser Lab

3 units

This seminar is designed both for the prospective scholar of Romanticism (the student who will make it central to intensive study in the major fields of 18th or 19th century literature) and for the reluctant or even resistant reader of Romantic poetry. Reading the major texts of the field, primary and secondary, we will investigate a term that has always vexed even its enthusiasts-Romanticism- as it is defined, with particular focus on the so-called Big Six poets, in the second decade of the 21st century Indeed, this workshop will enable graduate students in other fields (whether their principle genre is poetry or fiction) to situate Romanticism within today's curriculum, which means within other fields dominated by those isms (modernism and post-modernism, strucuturalism and post-structuralism) provoked by a sometimes (for the Romanticist) maddening certainty as to what Romanticism means, or meant, or indeed could mean. Students of early modernism are most welcome, as we consider the burden of the past inherited by the sometimes begrudging heirs of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. You need not have encountered in previous graduate or undergraduate courses the major Romantic poets-William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats-in order to benefit from a workshop that will provide intensive instruction in the art and scholarship of reading the Romantic lyric, the Romantic narrative poem, and the hybrid forms of Blake's composite art or Byron's rollicking Don Juan as these forms emerged in Britain between 1770 and 1830. We will read together the definitive scholarship of the past century during the crescendo of the Romantic lyric poem as the definitive example of British literary achievement against which other periods and forms were measured, from Irving Babbitt's vitriolic attack to the field's anxious self-questioning, provoked by deconstruction, New Historicism, and cultural studies. Situating the still-canonical Romantic poet within a literary culture that openly embraced the oral forms of outsiders and the special contributions of women writers (who cultivated both sense and sensibility), a culture that was alert to the political debates undermining old certainties about sovereignty and the scientific developments of what Richard Holmes recently called in a celebrated work the Age of Wonder, we will enlarge (as has the dominant scholarship in the field of British Romanticism) the sources and audiences that shaped the canonical Romantic poet. Our guiding question throughout the semester will be how to study, and teach, with fresh insights poets whose stature may already be shrinking, eclipsed by the very debates they themselves first provoked. Can there be an exceptional work of art in a democritizing era whose states of exception-revolutions in tastes, ethics, and political states-bind to, even as they put distance between, the contexts of the British Romantic Age and those of today's reader? Final projects will be encouraged that explore this question, either through intensive study of a single Romantic poet or within Romanticism or by locating the British Romantic poem within other fields of study.