Thom Van Camp, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Description
This course, Romanticism After Black Studies, ENG 804, is structured in response to the lament of romantic scholar Bakary Diaby, that recent movements in the study of romanticism have left “Blackness generally in Romanticism but not of it.” The starting point of this course is this argument: the expansion of the romantic literary canon—to include Black, non-white, and non-British authors—has done relatively little to reimagine romanticism as an aesthetic, philosophical, or critical category. While efforts toward archival recovery reimagine the past to amend our present, this course brings present work from the field of Black Studies to bear on the romantic canon and archive, and in doing so, shows how these old works may still matter to us today.
This course is primarily meant to offer students an introduction to the literature of the 19th century and recent critical work from the field of Black Studies. Thematically, the course is designed as a survey, providing a variety of avenues for students to enter this conversation. For example, texts are clustered around concepts like visual cultures, history of science, canon studies, and media history, to name a few.
Each week we will conduct an experimental co-reading of romantic poets and scholars from the Black radical tradition. We will allow the writing of thinkers like Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, and Achille Mbembe to provide the means of interpretation for the poetry of canonical romantic poets like William Wordsworth. These pairings, in their harmony and disharmony, constitute the grounds of a distinct reading practice directed by the terms and disciplinary conditions of Black Studies. As such, romanticism’s sense of history, its definition of liberty, its relation to science, and its vision of nature are all open to revision. Ultimately, this course is determined to find new patterns for sustaining an ethical romantic mode of scholarship.
Students will leave this course having gained experience designing and guiding a classroom session, carrying out independent research in a university archive, and producing a lengthy piece of academic writing. They will be comfortable discussing literary and scholarly trends in the field of 19th century studies and Romanticism. Further, students will have a strong historical understanding of Black Studies as a field. This will equip them to more confidently contextualize current conversations about Black Studies and public education.
Syllabus “Romanticism After Black Studies, ENG 804”
Introduction
This course is structured in response to the lament of romantic scholar Bakary Diaby, that recent movements in the study of Romanticism have left “Blackness generally in Romanticism but not of it.” The starting point of this course is this argument: the expansion of the Romantic literary canon—to include Black, non-white, and non-British authors—has done relatively little to reimagine Romanticism as an aesthetic, philosophical, scholarly, or critical category. While efforts toward archival recovery reimagine the past to amend our present, this course brings present work from the field of Black Studies to bear on the romantic canon, and in doing so, shows how these old works still matter to us today.
Each week we will conduct an experimental co-reading of romantic poets and scholars from the Black radical tradition. We will allow the writing of thinkers like Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, and Sylvia Wynter to provide the means of interpretation for the poetry of canonical romantic poets like William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and John Keats. These pairings, in their harmony and disharmony, constitute the grounds of a distinct reading practice directed by the terms and disciplinary conditions of Black Studies. As such, Romanticism’s sense of history, its definition of liberty, its relation to science, and its vision of nature are all open to revision. Ultimately, this course is determined to find new patterns for sustaining an ethical mode of Romantic scholarship.
Course Design
The foundation of this course will be comparative reading and collaborative discussion. As such, you will be expected to read all assigned materials and attend our sessions prepared to discuss these texts with your classmates. Each week (beginning Week 3) a different pair of students will be responsible for guiding discussion. This does not mean you are an expert on all the material, only that you have given careful thought to different ways the texts may be brought into conversation together and with the broader archive of our course.
Assignments
There will be two major writing assignments. The first will accompany your guided discussion. This might be a lesson plan or short essay; the piece will describe your perspective on the texts and your plan for leading your students through discussion. The second project is a critical essay, due at the end of the semester. This will be a significant piece of research writing guided by your reading in the class, supplemental texts, and archival research. The hope is that this piece could be submitted to academic journals for publication.
Archival Research
As a class we will visit the university’s Special Collections Library. You will learn to access this resource and how to interact with old media. Our library has particularly strong collections in the history of science and of 19th century writing, including a large body of work from the Caribbean. You will be expected to return to the library at least once to conduct independent research supporting your final project.
Grading Breakdown
Attendance/Participation: 30%
Discussion: 30%
Final Project: 40%
Schedule
Week 1: Images of Bondage
- Orlando Patterson: Slavery and Social Death
- William Blake: “Earth’s Answer”, The Book of Urizen, Stedman engravings
- Bakary Diaby: “Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism”
- Eric William: Slavery and Capitalism (excerpts)
Week 2: Romantic Archives (Meet in Special Collections)
- Saidiya Hartman: Scenes of Subjection, “Venus in Two Acts”, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
- John Keats: “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be”, “To one who has long in city pent”, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
- Theodor Adorno: “On Lyric Poetry and Society”
- Toni Morrison: “Romancing Slavery”
Week 3: Writing History
- Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic
- Laetitia Barbauld: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem
- James Chandler: England in 1819 (excerpts)
- William Levin: “The Eighteenth-century Jeremiad and Progress-piece Traditions in Anna Barbauld”
- Sunil Agnani: Hating Empire Properly
Week 4: The Caribbean and Romanticism
- Poetry of Haitian Independence: Kadish and Jenson, eds.
- Marlene Daut: Tropics of Haiti
- Marcus Rainsford: An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti
- Julius Scott: The Common Wind (excerpts)
- William Wordsworth: “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”
Week 5: The Caribbean and Romanticism Cont’d
- Visit Northeastern Early Caribbean Digital Archive
- Nicole Aljoe: Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies
- Derek Walcott: The Bounty
- Charlotte Smith: “To the Fire-Fly of Jamaica, Seen in a Collection”
- C.L.R. James: The Black Jacobins (excerpts)
- Kerry Sinanan: “The ‘Slave’ as Cultural Artifact: The Case of Mary Prince”
Week 6: Visions of Science
- Katherine McKittrick: Dear Science and Other Stories
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
- Sylvia Wynter: “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Women”, “‘No Humans Involved’: An open letter to my colleagues”
Week 7: Romantic Surveillance
- Simone Browne: Dark Matters
- Charlotte Smith: Beachy Head
- Bentham/Reveley: Panopticon design
- Lily Gurton-Wachter: Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention
- Manu Samriti Chander: Brown Romantics
Week 8: Return to the Archive
- Return to Special Collections for independent research
- Final project abstract due
Week 9: Red Shelley, Black Marxism
- Cedric Robinson: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
- Percy Shelley: “The Mask of Anarchy”, Prometheus Unbound
- Paul Foot: Red Shelley
- E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
Week 10: The Romantic Imagination
- Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Frost at Midnight”, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan”, Biographia Literaria
Week 11: On Liberty
- Frank Wilderson: Afropessimism
- William Wordsworth: “Liberty Sonnets”, The Prelude
- Matt Sandler: The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery
Week 12: The Romantic Canon
- Gauri Viswanathan: Masks of Conquest
- Stephen Best: None Like Us
- Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: The Teaching Archive
- John Guillory: Cultural Capital
- John Clare: selected poems
Week 13: Final Thoughts
- Reading TBD
- Trade papers for peer review