ENGL 323
Romantic Moods Fall 2018
Division I
Cross-listed COMP 373
This is not the current course catalog

Romanticism is often associated with the celebration of emotion over reason, passion over cold calculation. In fact, for the Romantics, the opposition between reason and emotion made little sense, since they were interested in how moods conditioned all human capabilities, including reasoning, from the ground up. In today’s age of mood-altering medications and technologies, like the smartphone and social media, we still have much to learn from Romanticism’s appreciation of the importance of mood. This seminar will examine the social, political, historical, and ecological implications of mood through readings of key works of literature, art, and philosophy from the Romantic period together with some 20th and 21st century works that extend the Romantic preoccupation with mood to the present day. Authors may include Burton, Kant, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, de Quincy, Schopenhauer, Freud, Arendt, Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, and Ngai.