Desires, hopes, excesses, transcendence – this is the very fabric American Romanticism is made of. The literature of the American Renaissance encompasses voices that want to be heard, were uncertain about their audiences but were manifested in texts everybody wanted to be written. The surge of many writings was accompanied by the visions of a plethora of different painters that tried to capture the essence of Romanticism on their canvases. In reading both visual and literary expressions of American Romanticism this course aims at a critical understanding of notions or attitudes art histories, literary, and cultural studies associate with Romanticism. Students of this course will learn to better identify and assess topics such as nationalism, desire and loss, nostalgia, idealism, the sublime, the gothic, rebellion, and the experiences of the individual in nature and/or separate from the masses. The readings of this course will tackle canonical writings and paintings in gendered and ethnic terms to learn more about the competing or complementary dimensions concepts such as American identity or American culture try to negotiate. Primary readings thus will range from romance narratives to gothic fiction and from essays to lyric poetry.
- Dozent/in: Marcel Hartwig
- Dozent/in: Joseph Imorde