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This course will explore keys texts of critics and scholars of Romanticism who were responsible for an intellectual and professional volte-face in literary studies in America from 1955 to 1990. In a series of lectures and books, Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (in)famously advanced the idea that Romanticism overturned Western traditions of reason and rationality and the notion of ethical absolutes and commonly agreed-upon standards and values. For Berlin, Romanticism, with its extreme emphasis on an individual’s quest for authenticity, encouraged the destruction of “objective truth”; it was seen as a step toward the dangers posed by nationalism, fascism, and totalitarianism. During the middle decades of the 20th century, literary scholars and critics in America, for intellectual reasons different from Berlin’s, cast the Romantics as emotional children, judging their poetry and prose as irrational, wildly disconnected from any sense of proportion and precision. Nonetheless, by the mid-to-late 1960s, such views of the Romantics had themselves been overturned, with new generations of critics and scholars championing the once-denigrated poets and writers as supreme purveyors of truth. |
