Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000 18:54:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Romanticism and Not-romanticism


On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Bill Freind wrote:

> 
> I think this thread on fascism and romanticism is very interesting, but I have a
> simple question: what's *not* Romanticism?

One problem which has silently bedeviled discussion of romanticism as
source of political movements is the manner in which the term is defined
differently in different national traditions. The garden-variety
dfinitions of romanticism used in English courses can be easily and
accurately (within their terms) applied to German writers like
Goethe.  But this sort of thing is likely to confuse Germanists, who
generally think of the younger Goethe as belonging to something called the
"Sturm und Drang" period and the later Goethe as exemplar of German
"Klassik" literature, understood in contrast to "Romantik," which is
much more morbid, melancholy and emotional strain of romanticism than
most of what fits under that broad umbrella term in English studies.  But
even "Klassik" late Goethe would seem clearly romantic to anyone using the
anglo-American definitions.  

(I add that I think both ways of categorizing and periodizing are
appropriate and useful.  Germans really need those distinctions. English
and Americans do not.)

> The standard opposition of Enlightenment reason vs. Romaticism emotion seems
> bogus to me (this in spite of the fact that I use it myself in my classes).
> Placing emphasis on the powers of reason will almost inevitably point out the
> limitations of reason -- as Hume and Kant illustrate.

"Enlightenment", like romanticism, also gets one involved in national
differences.  It is hard to think of Pope as a representative of the
Englightment. But it is easy to think of him as a "neoclassic."

So I think it is useful to contrast romanticism in English
literature with something called "neoclasscism" in English literature. 
There seem to me to be general differences between, say, Dryden, Pope and
Johnson, on the one hand, and Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge on the
other (to limit my illustration to poetry), and it is useful to point them
out to students.  

 Thus Romanticism becomes
> not a rebellion against the Enlightenment, but its logical and almost inevitable
> continuation. 

I think your insight here is sound, but I would add that "rebellion" and
"continuation" are not mutually
exclusive, especially when continuation means historicizing something
called "reason."  And while some strands of romantic reflection insist on
a classical respect for rationality, others do not.  So while romanticism
seems to be something new and different, it is also not just one thing,
but several, or perhaps many, defined at least by shift in focus of
interest, if not by direct reaction against specific cultural trends.

> Most modernists used "romantic" as a pejorative, but Wallace Stevens claimed that
> all art is essentially romantic. It's an interesting argument: go read a
> "classical" epic and look at the emphasis placed on the individual: Achilles'
> sulkiness, Ulysses' wiliness, etc. There's not a whole lot of reason to be found
> anywhere. That's why Plato thought the poets were so dangerous.

This is probably off topic but I can't resist: if the classical epics you
are alluding to are the Homeric epics, I don't see any emphasis on "the
individual" in them at all in the sense that I see an emphasis on the
individual in 18th or 19th century novels.
 
> I'm willing to bet you can make a compelling argument that most Enlightenment
> literature is really Romantic, but I'm not the person to do it.

Since I think the definitions we have have evolved out of close
reading and marking of "empirical" differences between influential works
written between, say, 1740-70 and those written between, say, 1780-1830, I
would like to hear that argument. 

hh
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