Graduate Course: Romantic Transport

Detail, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, "Psyche Transported to Heaven"

Instructor: Julie Carlson

Course: English 233, Winter 2015

How do we get from here to there and what does such movement signify?  What role does the aesthetic play in facilitating physical and mental movement, both desired and forced?   This seminar focuses on British and German Romantic-era texts that theorize and enact modes of embodied transport:  discourses regarding the sublime, imagination, metaphor, and the transporting capacities of art as well as texts depicting desired and forced transportation of bodies (slavery, emigration, urbanization, sexual experimentation). 

Most class sessions combine a Romantic-era theoretical text, a Romantic-era literary text, and a contemporary essay discussing a similar process in an effort to consider also how “romanticism” travels across times and places.  Readings include:  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, Anna Barbauld, England in Eighteen Hundred Eleven, William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion,S. T. Coleridge, Christabel, Thomas Clarkson, On the Rise, Progress, and Abolition of the Slave Trade.  Contemporary readings include chapters from Doris Sommers, The Work of Art in the World, Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously, Robin Kelley, Freedom DreamsD. W. WinnicottPlay and Reality, Norman Holland, The Brain and Literature.

Sketch of a slave hold by Thomas Clarkson

Image 1: Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, “Psyche Transported to Heaven”

Image 2: Thomas Clarkson, “Description of a Slave Ship”