Transcript romanticism slideshow

ROMANTICISM:
1800-1865
THE HEART OVER THE HEAD
ROMANTIC BELIEFS: INTUITION
 Reason, logic, and rationality have
shortcomings

They have their place, but they are limited
 Imagination, intuition, and emotion can
discover deeper, abstract, more significant
spiritual truths than reason can discover


Intuition: gut feeling; instinct
i.e.: Heaven; God; Beauty
ROMANTIC VIEW OF GOD
 Not anthropomorphic: didn’t see God as a person
 God is good, loving, merciful and created the
universe and us as good
 God is a spirit, a presence, a being that pervades all
 As such, God can be discovered by anyone at any
time through intuitive insight, usually in Nature away
from the noise and distractions of society
 Greatest good is to become one with God; to lose the
self and merge with the Divine.

Very Eastern Idea: Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism
 Didn’t care much for organized religion; no need for
the Bible, for a minister, for a Church to discover and
worship God
ROMANTIC BELIEFS: NATURE
 Nature is good, pure, and innocent
 Civilization is bad and the source of evil
 Civilization takes man out of his natural, good
state and corrupts him
 The more sophisticated and complex our
world is, the more disconnected from our
natural, good state we become
 “Noble Savage”
 God, the Divine, is found in Nature
 You discover God in Nature intuitively
ROMANTIC BELIEFS: TRUTH
 Beauty is truth
 It is recognized intuitively, from the heart, not
rationally through the brain
 Truth is located in a “transcendent” reality that is
beyond the physical world that can only be
discovered through emotion, imagination, intuition
 Truth often comes in spontaneous moments of
insight: epiphanies
 Truth is often found through insights gained in Nature
ROMANTIC BELIEFS: THE
INDIVIDUAL
 Human nature is good and we are born good
and pure; society and its forces corrupt
 Individual is more important than society
 Society usually is in conflict with the
individual, restricting his/her independence,
uniqueness, and power
 Trust your self; YOU are the source of truth
since the Divine is found within you
 No need to give authority of your life to
anyone else: you know best what to do
ROMANTIC VALUES
 Imagination; NOT logic
 Intuition; NOT carefully reasoned thought
 Spontaneity; NOT careful prudence and
 Emotion; NOT detached, dry analysis
 The Individual’s power; NOT mindless
allegiance to the rules of society
 Exploration: of Nature, of the mind, of the far
away and distant, of the exotic and extreme
 Deeper spiritual truths; NOT logical ones
ROMANTIC VALUES
 Youthful exuberance and energy over
conservative, prudent, thoughtful experience
 A nostalgia for the past
 The raw, the natural, the unsophisticated over
the polished, the refined, the carefully
planned
THE THREE BRANCHES OF
ROMANTICISM
ROMANTICISM
CLASSIC ROMANTICS
TRANSCENDENTALISM
DARK ROMANTICS
DARK ROMANTICS: POE,
MELVILLE, AND HAWTHORNE
 How they differ from the other branches:
 Not optimistic about life, human nature, or
nature
 The truths they discover beyond the rational
are horrific, frightening, and painful
 The emotions they tend to emphasize are fear,
dread, disgust, etc
 How they are similar to the other branches:
 They do believe in deeper, irrational truths
 Emphasis on imagination and emotion
GOTHIC ELEMENTS
 The bizarre: live burial; whales that carry a
grudge; insanity
 The exotic: castles, faraway places, the
dreary and the dark
 The supernatural: vampires; creating
monsters
 Classic Examples:



Dracula
Frankenstein
Anything by Poe
ROMANTIC LITERATURE
 Poetry: imitative of British: Bryant,
Longfellow, Holmes
 Essays: new unique ideas: Thoreau,
Emerson
 Short Stories: become a legitimate gnere:
Poe, Hawthorne
 Adventure Novels: idealizes Nature and
frontier life: Cooper
OVERALL SIGNIFICANCE
 America’s literary, intellectual, cultural
“Declaration of Independence”
 Now producing unique, authoritative, timeless
ideas and literature for the first time
 The final escape from British influences other
that the political: no more imitating British
forms and ideas
 We have matured and gained confidence to
do our own thing as proven by the great
American Romantics