English BC 3176
The Romantic Era
Fall term, 2001
Tu/Th 5:40 - 6:55
403 Barnard Hall

Cary Plotkin
401b Barnard Hall
x42101
cplotkin@barnard.columbia.edu
Office hours: TBA

Synoptic Syllabus

 

I.                    The End of an Order

Sept.

4

Introduction: Romanticism and Revolution

 

6

The Neo-classical Mould: The Measure of Tradition.  Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism [1711], An Essay on Man [1733]

 

11

Pre-romantic eruptions: “Sturm und Drang.” Goethe, “Prometheus,” The Sorrows of Young Werther [1774]; “Dionysius Longinus,” “On the Sublime”

 

13

Mystic threshold and rustic hearth: Blake, Burns, Clare

 

18

Blake (cont’d)

Inter-section I

 

20

From Classic to Romantic: art and music

II.                  The First Generation: Wordsworth and Coleridge

 

25

Wordsworth: “Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads [1798], “Preface” to the 2nd edition of Lyrical Ballads [1800], “Appendix to the Preface” [1802];  Coleridge, Biographia Literaria XIV [1815]; Wm. Hazlitt, from The Liberal, 2( 1823) from “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” from The Spirit of the Age (from “Mr. Wordsworth”) [1825] [handouts]

 

27

Wordsworth: shorter lyrics TBA

Oct.

2

Coleridge: Conversation poems:  “The Eolian Harp,” “Frost at Midnight”

 

4

The Greater Romantic Lyric I: Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”

 

9

The Greater Romantic Lyric II: Wordsworth, (“My Heart Leaps Up”), “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from recollections of Early Childhood”;  Coleridge, Essay XI from The Friend, Second Section, [1818] (“On Method” in Richards)

 

11

The Greater Romantic Lyric III: Coleridge, “Dejection: an Ode,” from Biographia Literaria (TBA),  1st ¶ of Essay X from “On Method”

 

16

The (unfinish(ed?)(able?) epic of the self I: Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion; from The Recluse; The Prelude,or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Book First

 

18

II:  Prelude II-VII

 

23

III: Prelude VIII-XIV

 

25

Natural Supernaturalism: Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Christabel

Inter-section II

 

Nov.

30

1

German Idealism  Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer

Goethe, Faust

 

6

Thanksgiving holidays

III.               The Second Generation: Keats and Shelley

 

8

Keats, Letters, sonnets

 

13

Enchanted imagination:  Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes; “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

 

15

Keats: The Great Odes I, “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” Ode on a Grecian Urn”

 

20

Keats: The Great Odes II, “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” “To Autumn”

 

22

Thanksgiving holidays

 

27

Playing with fire: Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry”; Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, “To a Sky-Lark”

 

29

What nature hears:  Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” “Mont Blanc”

Dec.

4

Myth, revoltion, regeneration: Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

IV.                The Romantic Legacy

 

6

Nature and human nature: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

 

 

 

Texts

(On order at Labyrinth)

 

William Blake, Selected Poetry and Prose (McGraw-Hill)

Joh. W. von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Signet)

__________, Faust, tr. Barker Fairley (U. of Toronto)

Wm Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces (Houghton)

S.T. Coleridge, The Portable Coleridge (Viking)

P.B. Shelley, Poetry and Prose (Norton)

John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters (Houghton)

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights  (Norton)