The Age of Romanticism: Painting, Literature, Politics

Starting with the French Revolution of 1789, this course will explore a radical change in European sensibility foregrounding the self. Whether as a political subject entailed with rights (or the lack thereof), or as an artist or poet gifted with powers of "projection" - of subjectively imagining the world as it might be and somehow actually is - the Romantic subject (in England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States) became both "civic-minded" and "psychological," both hopeful and gothically depressed. Studying artists and poets such as Jacques-Louis David, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco Goya, J.M.W. Turner and Raphaelle Peale, we will investigate the place of Romanticism in our lives today.