Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

Students interested in the class are invited to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet in advance of the first class meeting on January 22.

Is criticism the story of falling in or out of love? When does desire end and critical reflection on it begin? From Wordsworthian “wise passiveness” to Keatsian “Negative Capability,” a number of Romantic tropes and attitudes privilege passive over active modes of desire, contemplative over end-oriented action, reception over production, and imaginative transformation over other, more overt forms of political revolution.  In this course, we examine Romantic investments in derivative, secondary, ghostly, or belated actions:  reading, receiving, remembering, revising, translating, echoing, and doubling.  We also consider the ways in which these unfinished, reflective, and self-reflexive romances return in twentieth-century critical and literary theory, in the form of preoccupations with irony, belatedness, trauma and unclaimed experience. Informing our discussions of dramas of revenge and revenge’s various antitheses—patience, waiting, forgiveness, recantation, repeal, deferred response—will be the recent attempts on the part of post-modern critics to articulate an ethics of “response” to the Other distinct from both modern liberalism’s rationalist ethics of self-preservation AND Nietzsche’s analysis of the resentment of “slave-morality.”

Representative texts will include:

Austen, Persuasion

Constant, Adolphe

Emerson, “Experience”

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments

Kleist, “Uber das Marionettentheater”

Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”; “Philosophy of Composition”

Schlegel, Critical and Athenaeum Fragments; “On Incomprehensibility”

Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound”

Stendhal, De l’amour

Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text