HUMANITIES 1301
DR. PEGGY BROWN
ROMANTICISM
- Imagination.
Man's truest freedom is expressed in his acts of imagination.
Fantasy: Goya's idea that the sleep of reason produces monsters.
Supernatural subjects
- Intense feelings for nature.
Pantheistic: God is transcendent reality of which nature, the material world, and humanity are manifestations
Nature is organic rather than mechanical.
Nature is a symbol of spirit or as a vehicle for self-consciousness.
Conflict of city vs. country.
Spontaneous experience in nature.
- Feeling is source of all that is best.
Love and compassion
Feelings that bind men together (encourages nationalism)
Sincerity
- Alienation and estrangement
Divorce of the inner and the outer realities
Cultivation of intense feeling as antidote to estrangement.
Nature as a means of returning to feelings
- Emphasis on subjectivity, inwardness, psychological analysis.
Willingness to risk
Attempt to cultivate unusual states of mind
Aversion to rational thinking and common sense
Interest in the irrational and insane, the intuitive and immediate.
- Suspicion of analytic reason, the "meddling intellect" whereby men "murder to dissect."
The generation that matured about 1800 felt for the Enlightened a contempt as deep as any on record. Voltaire's Candide, according to Wordsworth, was "that dull product of a scoffer's pen. He summed it up:
Enough of science and of art;
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
- Emphasis on individualism.
Cultivation of modes of behavior calculated to exempt the self from the unimaginative norms of the bourgeois ethos
The artist now becomes an inspired "genius" who is free to break the "rules," ignore cultural precedents, and write "free" verse.
- Exceeding boundaries and the conflicts such excesses caused.
Follow the visionary and the desires--but death could--and did--result.
Yearned for the infinite, the unconditioned, the absolute.
Dallied with the states of mind in which the normal limits of the mortal world are transcended (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an example).
- Nostalgia
For the classical, the Medieval (chivalry, courtly love, adventure, Gothic novel), the native existence (cultural)
For a state of childhood (personal)
- Either extreme: optimism or pessimism
Some lamented the inexpressibility of it all. They claimed feelings, visions, intuitions beyond the adequacy of the cultural medium. They felt the media available were inadequate for the intensity of their expression.
Others reveled in the passion. Intense feeling was enough. These were the optimists.
- Attraction to the sublime in nature.
Daenas: a Greek word that means awesome--something that is both horrible and wonderful.