Studies in the Nineteenth-Century

An in-depth comparative study of some of the major European Romantic and early Modernist poets (Keats, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Rilke and Yeats) focusing in particular on their relationship to the theoretical concept and experience of modernity.

We will try to avoid overly rigid or predetermined understandings of terms such as “romanticism” and “modernism” by focusing instead on each poet’s responses to the changes represented by urbanization, the rationalization of time and space, and the advent of mass culture in the age of mechanical reproduction; we will attempt to understand the changing roles–messianic, consolatory, critical, representative– assigned the figure of the “solitary” poet and “autonomous” work of art during the age of print capital and European colonialism. As we supplement our readings of the poetry with major texts from contemporary European aesthetic philosophy, we will give particular attention to the construction of “Western” and “modern” art as the dialectical fulfillment and negation of “other”–lost, past or pre-modern–ideals.

Most crucially, however, we will want to ask what happens when we read together poets together who, in different ways, push the limits of language as an expressive medium, and are passionately engaged by the relations of the verbal to the visual arts, of visionary to sensory experience, of memory to imagination, and of language to violence. Tracing the meeting of stone and flesh, of the carnal and the sacred in their poetry, we will compare recurring figures of poetry as prayer, poetry as transgression, and poetry as bearing witness to limit-experiences.

Time permitting, room will be made for students’ interests in other poets of the period.

Reading List:

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal and Petits Poèmes en Prose

Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems

Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments

John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poetry

Course Reader (including a selection of Yeats’s poems and critical essays by Abrams, Poe, Benjamin, Brook, Culler, Cameron, de Man, and others).