SHUM 4991

Romanticism and the Fate of the Senses

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2014-2015 Catalog.

What if, William Blake once asked, every bird that flies "is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?" Asking what real and possible worlds our habits of sensory perception exclude, Romantic poets criticized their culture's increasing faith in sense-based, empirical knowledge - knowledge supposedly free from subjective bias, historical circumstance, national prejudice, and political complicity. This seminar will focus on poetry as a form of sensory re-training and on Romantic and post-Romantic claims to a politics of perception. Can artworks access rival science, non-human experience, or otherwise unthinkable histories - or sensually suspend the pressure to do so? Readings from Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Goethe, Locke, Foucault, Latour, Daston, Rancière, Bourdieu, Williams, de Man, Adorno, Terada, Stewart, and Hartman.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

When Offered Spring.

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