04:30 PM to 07:10 PM W
Section Information for Spring 2016
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 lead: 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. Central questions include: how do we know who we are? What can we know of who others are? How are memory, narrative, and selfhood intertwined? How do ideas of selfhood emerge and change in the Romantic era? 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.
Likely reading list: Rousseau, Reveries; Wollstonecraft, Letters from a Short Residence...; Godwin, Caleb Williams; W. Wordsworth, Prelude (excerpts); D. Wordsworth, Journals (excerpts); De Quincey, Confessions of a English Opium Eater; Byron, Don Juan (excerpts); Lister, Diary.
ENGH 400 001 enrollment is controlled. Contact the department for approval to register via Patriot Web.
Credits: 3
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