ENGL 8373 American Romanticism
Snediker
2:30 M
This course approaches American Romanticism less as literary movement than as
theoretical disposition. The extent to which the authors sometimes imagined within this
rubric strike us as a coherent entity has something to do, beyond the shadow of canonicity,
with their ravishing capacity for restlessness. To this end, we shall study texts in whose
dismantlingly re-energized light we might more rigorously understand literature’s relation
to ethics, ontology, desire, and aesthetics. Our commitment to readerly attentiveness will in
turn illuminate the outer conceptual limits (what Whitman in a different context calls “the
extremest verge”) of personality as it (phenomenologically, aesthetically, epistemologically)
encounters, engages, and sometimes inhabits both itself and the ecologies nominally
external to it. Authors will include Melville (Moby Dick, Pierre, “Bartleby”), Hawthorne
(The Scarlet Letter, Twice-Told Tales), Edgar Allan Poe (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym, selections from Eureka), as well as Emerson, Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and
Dickinson. Overlap between this class and my Fall 2014 course on 19th-Century American
Poetics will be minimal. Assignments include annotated bibliography, weekly short critical
analyses, a final paper (or, upon approval, creative project).