German Romanticism

GERMAN 128 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course examines German Romanticism as a set of collective intellectual practices: a sustained, contentious experiment in thinking (and sometimes loving) together. We begin with the Romantic fragment and theory of irony as a social and formal framework, then trace how the central problem of German Idealism -- the fracture between self and world -- was answered differently depending on who was doing the answering and through what medium. Around the vibrant university town of Jena, Novalis and Hölderlin responded to the philosopher Fichte's notion of a perpetually striving, creative subject of self-invention — a view of the self still very much with us today. Concurrently, Goethe and Karoline von Günderrode responded in poetry to Schelling's notion of nature as a living, free agent of self-production. Alongside these philosophical confrontations, we will examine Romanticism's collective publication projects (Symphilosophie) and its public influence campaigns, including intellectual journals (Schlegel's Athenäum vs. Schiller's Die Horen) and the transcription of oral folk traditions of the fairy tale (Märchen) and song (Lied), which generated new genres such as the artistic fairy tale (Kunstmärchen). Finally, we will attend to the ways in which Romanticism's early focus on the philosophical 'Absolute' shifts toward a more religious, neomedieval register in late Romantic works. Thematic foci include: the fragment and Romantic irony; philosophical style and its publics; the dialectic of subject and nature; folk tradition and national identity; and the discovery of yearning, dreams, and the uncanny as Romanticism's contribution to psychology.