PSCI 234
Political Romanticism Spring 2019
Division II
Cross-listed COMP 329 / PSCI 234 / ENGL 322
This is not the current course catalog

What is Romanticism, and how does it relate to the world-changing political upheavals that emerge along with it? Romantic literature emerged around the time of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and many Romantic authors were deeply sympathetic to the democratic principles of freedom and equality that inspired such political uprisings. Yet many also questioned revolutionaries’ attempts to realize such ideas by forcibly seizing control of governments. These authors became interested in art and literature as alternative means of bringing about social and political change. In so doing, they invented ideas about the political power of art that are still very much with us today. This seminar examines these ideas through readings of works of Romantic literature, philosophy, and art that brought them into the world, while also considering how arguments subsequently developed for and against political Romanticism inform today’s heated debates about the relationship between art and politics. May include works by Kant, Wordsworth & Colderige, C. Smith, P.B. Shelley, Géricault, Delacroix, Turner, Hazlitt, Hegel, Marx, C.L.R James, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Rancière.