The essays on Teaching Global Romanticism collected here present varied approaches to teaching Romanticism in a global context through individual assignments, units, and syllabi. The contributors share ways to enrich pedagogical approaches to Romantic literature and culture with texts and ideas from beyond Britain and America. These essays discuss how literature guides students’ engagement with international themes and issues in the Romantic period and after. The initiative for this volume began under the leadership of William Stroup.
Abstract
The essays on Teaching Global Romanticism collected here present varied approaches to teaching Romanticism in a global context through individual assignments, units, and syllabi. The contributors share ways to enrich pedagogical approaches to Romantic literature and culture with texts and ideas from beyond Britain and America. These essays discuss how literature guides students’ engagement with international themes and issues in the Romantic period and after. The initiative for this volume began under the leadership of William Stroup.
Abstract
This paper describes a course that covers the Romantic period of European and American literature as the moment and site of the modern invention and institution of “culture”—both as an object of study and as a historical and ethical basis for the establishment of self and society. During a 15-week semester, the students and I read, in English, aesthetic treatises by Blair, Herder, and Schiller, poetry by Macpherson and Byron, and novels by Rousseau, Goethe, Staël, and Cooper.
European Romanticism and Frankenstein: A Comparative Literature Course for English Majors
Wendy C. NielsenAbstract
“European Romanticism and Frankenstein: A Comparative Literature Course for English Majors” outlines a course that prepares future teachers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to acknowledge the novel’s French and German influences. Such influences include Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and The Sufferings of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of the texts that the creature finds in the forest.
Taking a Step, Learning from Below, and Imagining Planetarity in Romanticism: On Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three
Marques ReddAbstract
This essay distills the experience of teaching an upper-division English course entitled “An Introduction to Global Romanticisms.” This class focused on one text over the course of the semester – Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson’s experimental anthology Poems for the Millennium Volume 3: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry. This collection attempts to construct a truly global Romantic tradition.
Abstract
This article argues that India occupies a central position in Romantic literature, and that this centrality requires teachers of this period to engage with India as both a site of cultural production and an object of imaginative fascination. It offers teachers of Romantic literature a pedagogical framework and three specific case studies to illustrate approaches to Romantic India across a range of courses.
Translating Revolution into Spanish: British Romanticism and the Spanish-Speaking World
Juan SánchezAbstract
“Translating Revolution into Spanish: British Romanticism and the Spanish-Speaking World” offers ways of teaching British Romanticism through the lens of human rights. The proposed course covers the pamphlet wars of the 1790s in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications of the Rights of Woman.
Abstract
My aim is to consider the ways in which the “black Atlantic” and its combined focus on music and literature redefine the field of Romanticism and how this redefinition translates into the classroom. One pedagogical approach is to examine how Wheatley maps time, space, and memory through meter. Through attention Wheatley’s use of syncopation, it’s possible to see how her verse subverts the colonialist notion of mapping, accounting for and claiming ownership of internal and external space as well as rhythmical spaces of lines of poetry and typography.
Appendix A: Readings for Literature and Culture of the Romantic Period: The Logic of Culture
Eric GidalAbstract
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
Abstract
The class will discuss themes common to Romantic-era writing, such as nature, utopia, freedom, the grotesque, and the uncanny across several fictional genres (poetry, drama, prose, memoir, and novellas). Students will leave the course with an appreciation for the ways in which literary movements transcend national and generic borders.
Abstract
This course will focus particularly on the Romantic exploration of new forms of language, consciousness, and social/biological relationships; experiments with dreamwork and other visionary practices; reassessments of ancient cultural terrains; foregrounding of the subjective, emotional, and transcendental; movement towards globalism; and reconstruction of the concept of the poem itself.
Abstract
This course examines imaginative representations of the self in the poems, novels, autobiographies, essays, and sermons of the earliest African American writers, including the works of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass and draws connections with contemporary writers and musicians.
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Pedagogies Edition: Teaching Global Romanticism © 2020 by Wendy C. Nielsen is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0