English 9157
Romantic Dialogues
Instructor: Professor Monika Lee.
Fall Half Course.
In the contexts of dialogue, conversation, influence, intertextuality, adaptation, collaboration, and translation, this course will explore how such interactions constitute Romantic modes of cognition. Various Romantic idealisms (Rousseau, Coleridge, Schelling) inform "fast influencing" and "an unremitting interchange" between texts in dialogue with one another and with themselves, revealing a split or fragmented self, a multifaceted consciousness, and a polyphonic resistance to authority. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s responses to precursor texts, creative collaborators (such as Mary Shelley), figural addressees, foreign languages, or other art forms (such as music and the visual arts) represent a subjectivism which implies a fractured, unstable, or mutable psyche. The course will explore how "Romantic dialogues" seek to convey and/or subvert a radical temporality implying immanence. Beginning with "A Defence of Poetry," we will proceed through close readings of texts in conversation with other texts and contexts: The Cenci with Italian Renaissance paintings and Greek Sculpture; The Cenci with Valperga; Prometheus Unbound with the 1818 Frankenstein; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with Frankenstein; Epipsychidion with passages from Friedrich Schelling; Shelley's "Music," "A Faded Violet," and passages in "A Defence of Poetry" with his translations of scenes from Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso" and scenes from Goethe's Faust; and various literary tropes and figures as part of a conversation with futurity.
