Sunday, June 7, 2015

On (Teaching) English Romanticism

Dear Readers,

I have been working on my ENG 419, British Romanticism, syllabus for fall, and enjoying immensely rethinking and focusing this course which I have taught previously.  My brief description that I give to the students on the syllabus reads as follows:  "The first generation of English Romantics was faced with the cataclysm of the French Revolution and its aftermath, which meant war for Great Britain and the threat of invasion.  Yet the Revolution represented at least in name some of the very values that the British held dear (i.e., liberty, equality, and brotherhood).  We will examine this semester the works of English Romantics who are considering in deep and analytical ways the impact of the Revolution and the emergence of ideas of individualism and nationhood in the 1790s into the early nineteenth century.  We will read those who saw the French Revolution as the end of civilized behavior and the death of chivalry (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France), those who saw it as an opportunity to transform society in remarkably liberal ways (Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice), those who used the period as a time for great and transformative making of art and literature (William Blake, Vala/The Four Zoas, The Book of Urizen, Milton, and Jerusalem), and those who used the ideas of the period to transform the domestic novel into something very different than what it had been (Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter and Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock)."

The work I have become most excited about in the list is Godwin's Enquiry.  According the back blurb, this work marks the beginning of "philosophical anarchism."  I am not sure I agree with this characterization of the Enquiry, unless the one ("philosophical anarchism") shades in its definition a bit into modern libertarianism. There is still way too much generosity and care for the other in Godwin to fit fully or comfortably into the libertarian camp, though; for the versions of at least American libertarianism I know tend to be very deeply individualistic and self-obsessed, not acknowledging nor caring that we are part of the same society and that as part of that society--that social contract, to use Rousseau's phrasing--we bear some responsibility one to another. Philosophical anarchism falls into some of the same traps but its utopian spirit, which tends not to be so narcissistic, is attractive though not practicable or implementable as I see it.  Godwin seems to me to be arguing for something that still shares the interconnectedness of what will become more fully the socialist impulse (after Marx) in England in the nineteenth century than perhaps either philosophical anarchism or libertarianism.

More significantly, at least for my reading of Godwin, is his notion of literature.  Godwin is not willing nor desirous of separating the various forms of texts--literary, historical, philosophical--into categories, but sees them all adhering to one another under the notion of literature and their using/employing the literary in their makeup.  He has a very high calling for the transformative impact of literature and the literary on culture and this is a vision of his that I deeply share as well. Perhaps this is why Godwin also was invested in what can only be labelled a kind of philosophical and, at least in the care of Caleb Williams, a proto-Marxist fiction, and later with children and the production and circulation of children's books.  It will be fascinating to see what the students this fall make of this impressive man, his political/philosophical treatise, and the historical context(s) from which it emerges.

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