Classes

Key romantic topics that remain relevant to literature and art, e.g., symbol, language, aesthetics, nature (“green” romanticism), history, irony, gender. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Emerson, Fuller, and Poe; others and recent critics as well.

The Enlightenment creates modern ideas of the self, a just society, and reformed institutions. The course explores six interrelated developments: (1) taking nothing on authority, a spirit of critique examines knowledge, religion, and government; (2) the spread of general...

Readings in Blake, Baillie, Coleridge, Clare, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others. Lyric and narrative forms. Close aesthetic readings linked to thematic considerations. Social and political contexts. Romanticism as an artistic movement and cultural...

will examine the works of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (Johnson's biographer), Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Robert Burns, and others. Essays, biography, political and historical writing, poetry, and the novel.

Concentrates on poems before 1820: The Ruined Cottage, Home at Grasmere, Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, sonnets, Poems of 1807 and collected poems of 1815; also selected later work. The seminar explores Wordsworth’s thematic and formal originality, engagement with nature...

Significant critical orientations: modernism, classicism, romanticism, the New Criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism, as well as feminism, formalism, and other -isms. Theoretical formulations yet also practical criticism, history of criticism, and critical writings...

Rhetorical theory, originating with Aristotle, in contemporary applications. The nature of rhetoric in modern culture; practical examples drawn from American history and literature 1765 to the present; written exercises and attention to public speaking; the history and...

Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Montagu, and others; the lyric, periodical literature, satire, biography, and drama; relations of engaged literature with politics, religion, history; issues of audience, gender, class, genre, and canon. Note: An intensive...