ENGH 400: Honors Seminar

ENGH 400-001: Romantic Lives
(Spring 2012)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T

Krug Hall 253

Section Information for Spring 2012

Our present memoir-mad, confessional, gossipy and celebrity-obsessed culture had its counterpart, or maybe its origin, in the Romantic culture of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. In that revolutionary era, heady with ideas of the rights of the individual and intensely fascinated by individual psychology, memory, and childhood experience, writers experimented with and popularized new ways to narrate the self--and in the process, they created new ways of imagining who we are as selves, and how we come to be ourselves. And writers had terrific stories to tell about the romantic lives they led: their adventurous travel in exotic lands, their wild drug trips, their participation in earth-shaking historical events, their passionate romances. In this honors seminar, we'll explore Romantic-era biographical and autobiographical writing in a variety of genres, from tell-all confessions to epic poems to private journals and letters, and we'll read some works of fiction that pose as real-life confessions. We'll pay special attention to the way writers of the period provocatively blurred the boundaries between life and text, to the way writers grappled with questions of memory and identity, and to the way writers stage-managed their public selves for fame and fortune. Texts may include Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential Confessions,Thomas De Quincey's sensational Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, William Godwin's Gothic Caleb Williams (possibly the first detective novel), Olaudah Equiano's autobiographical account of slavery and freedom, Helen Maria Williams' eye-witness account of the French Revolution, fiction and letters by the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, poetry and letters of the international celebrity Lord Byron, works by both William and Dorothy Wordsworth, journals of the peasant poet John Clare and the lesbian diarist Anne Lister, and--as an alternative model of constructing the story of self--Jane Austen's novel Persuasion. To help us think about the self-fashioning and self-disclosure going on in these texts, we'll do some reading in modern theories of autobiography, sexuality, and selfhood, and read some Romantic-era and modern biography as well.

Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Emphasizes growth in awareness of literary scholarship as a discipline, providing opportunity for advanced study in literary and cultural criticism. Covers variety of topics, including consideration of a literary period, genre, author, work, theme, discourse, or critical theory. Offered by English. May be repeated within the term for a maximum 6 credits.
Specialized Designation: Topic Varies
Recommended Prerequisite: Open only to English department honors students.
Schedule Type: Lecture
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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