ENGL 509: Romantic Literature: New Romanticisms
Professor: Dr. Kathy Beres-Rogers
Location: CofC (Room TBD)
Time: Wednesday 7:00 – 9:45
In high schools and even in undergraduate institutions, the Romantics are often taught as six white men (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron) writing in isolated settings. To complicate this approach, this course will take an approach suggested by Stephen Behrendt in his 2000 article, “New Romanticisms.” Instead of learning about the Romantic era as if we were in a museum, we will be focusing on the conversations— literary, philosophical, scientific—that inform what we now view as “Romanticism.” These conversations importantly included women, people of color, and writers of various gender identities, sexual orientations, and abilities. The topics we discuss will be inspired by the 2021 International Conference on Romanticism: a wonderful way to access the most current conversations in the field. By engaging with Romanticism in a different way, I encourage us to re-evaluate how we might define the Romantic era: is there, as Behrendt argues, more than one way to understand this era? And, if so, how do we decide which interpretation to privilege? In our own era of “fake news” and growingly striated discourse communities, I encourage us to see the model of conversation as a more productive way of viewing literature…and life.
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