The Romantic Experience

Conducted in English. Counts toward German major, German minor, and German Studies minor. This course traces a number of themes which were first expressed in the writings of European Romantics during the early nineteenth century and which shaped European and American intellectual history throughout the twentieth century. Such themes are, for example, love, emotion, nature, spirit, solitude, the miraculous, the sublime, and mental insanity. Texts (three novels, an autobiographical memoir, a short story, an essay, poems, letters, and fairy tales) include works by Rousseau, Goethe, Jane Austen, the Grimm brothers, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Jack Kerouac.