Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Investigates cross-cultural literary movements that challenge the status quo. Focal points might include romanticism, modernism, existentialism, or other cultural and political tendencies, with attention to how such styles or movements gain impetus in new national/regional settings. This course may be repeated for credit when different topics are offered. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

ROMANTICISM & THE EXOTIC
REVOLT, ORIENTALISM, and the TROPICAL GOTHIC

Romanticism has been seen as a reaction against the claims of enlightenment reason and order, and the recognition that the European “world view” has only ever been one among many.  It is also described as the era in which the contents of art and thought surpass their own limitations, fulfilling the imagination’s sometimes terrifying promise of ‘infinite inner space’.  Yet, however revolutionary the period, the romantic era was also a time of colonial apprehension and intermingling.  The contestation between world cultures frames our course theme: what happens when the imaginations of individuals and nations are confronted by the equally sublime otherness of different artistic and physical environments? 

With reference to contemporary scandals surrounding the treatment of ‘colonized’ peoples, our course works move from Western Europe to the supposedly exotic landscapes and peoples elsewhere, including interracial transgression in South-East Asia, and Voodoo and the feminine in the Caribbean.  Through exploring terms such as exoticism, orientalism, and the sublime, students come to comprehend the full scope of romanticism’s darker performativity at the crossings of inner experience, Gothic extravagance, and the global other.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

 

• Comprehension of Romanticism as a global phenomenon
• Knowledge of literary concepts: the sublime, Orientalism, the Gothic
• Ability to undertake cross-cultural comparisons across different media

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: