Transcript AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT - dominated cultural thought from the last decade of the 18th century well into the first.

AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT
- dominated cultural thought from the last decade
of the 18th century well into the first decades of
the 20th century
- First appearance in Germany in the 1770s
(“Sturm und Drang”); flowering in England in
the 1790s; importation to America from the
1820s onward
• To a large degree, Romanticism was a reaction
against the Enlightenment or Age of Reason,
especially its emphasis on formal propriety,
classical style, and decorum
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-2
• The Enlightenment faith in a
perfectible material and
spiritual universe through the
power of human reason was
shaken by the revolutions that
ended the century (The
American Revolution, The
French Revolution, and the
Napoleonic Wars—some
Romantic artists actually—for a
while—exalted Napoleon as
the ultimate Romantic hero—
e.g., Beethoven in his “Eroica
Symphony,” which later was
used in Hitchcock’s Psycho…)
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-3
• Question: What comes to mind or what do
you associate with the term
“Romanticism”?
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT
• Although we usually associate a quaint or
exaggerated effusion of emotion with
Romanticism (hence, the shift in meaning
of the word “Romantic” to everything
relating love…), the Romantic age brought
about concepts of the individual and
his/her relationship to the world/society
that we still largely subscribe to, even
champion today.
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-4
• Romanticism is the cult of the individual--the cultural and
psychological birth of the I--the Self
• Belief in an inner spark of divinity that links one human
being to another and all human beings to the larger
“Truth”
• In poetry, visual art, and music, artists became
increasingly preoccupied with articulating the personal
experience that becomes, in turn, a representative one
• IMAGINATION becomes the source of artistic
vision/creativity (during the neo-classical age,
imagination was linked to “fancy,” which implied the
fantastic, fictive, and even false)
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-5
• The artist (especially, the poet): takes on
quasi-religious status not only as prophet
and moral leader
• The poet/artist as a divinely inspired
vehicle through which Nature and the
common man find their voices
• Esp.: See William Wordsworth, “Preface”
to Lyrical Ballads
– Poet as Prophet
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-6
• Concern for the common man: came from both the
democratic changes of the age of Revolution, as well as
an interest in folk culture
• In part, the search to preserve the stories, songs,
legends, and verse of the common people came from a
nationalistic impulse
– E.g. in Germany, the Grimm brothers collected the fairy tales of
their region and country while assembling a comprehensive
dictionary of the German language (the German equivalent of
Webster’s in the 19th century!)
• But: the Folk Movement also produced an international
language of human commonality, at whose center stood
the images of home and the heart.
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-6
• aesthetic changes: individuality translated
into the revolution of feeling against form
• Poets, painters, and musicians no longer
trying to make their expression fit
conventional forms, but carving out new
forms to capture their feelings and
thoughts
• Emphasis on the language of the Soul
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-6
•
Quintessential Romantic figures: the hero, the wanderer, and the genius:
– all journey to new lands (literally and figuratively), defy limitations, and overcome
obstacles
– SHREK, anybody???
– Hero/wanderer fascination also came from the Romantic
identification and exploration of everything Medieval (the
Middle Ages were thought to be characterized by mystery and
irrationality)
•
Typical Romantic motifs:
–
–
–
–
–
Exotic lands (Melville, especially his South Sea novels and Moby Dick)
Amorphous world of dreams (Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”)
Dark terrors of the psyche (E. A. Poe!)
Dizzying heights—in both nature and human creativity (Frankenstein…)
Sublime vistas in nature reflecting the divine and potentially terrifying powers o f
the human mind, spirit, and soul
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-7
• For the Romantic, nature was a constant
companion and teacher--both benign and
tyrannical
• Nature became
– the stage on which the human drama was played
– the context in which man came to understand his
place in the universe
– the transforming agent which harmonized the
individual soul with what the Transcendentalists would
call the Over-Soul.
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT-8
• Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and
art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character
who speaks in a language of symbols at once
mysterious and anthropomorphic (i.e. speaking
with a voice similar to human voice, i.e. sharing
human qualities and characteristics, especially
in personification of natural objects, phenomena,
etc.)
• allows man to come into dialogue with the lifeforce
ROMANTICISM: MAJOR FIGURES
• Germany:
– Authors: Goethe (esp. The Sorrows of Young
Werther and Faust), Schiller (esp. William
Tell); Novalis, Eichendorff, Schlegel, and the
Grimm brothers
– Painters: Caspar David Friedrich
– Composers: Beethoven, Schubert (songs),
Mendelssohn (wedding march from
Midsummer Night’s Dream), Richard Wagner,
ROMANTICISM: MAJOR FIGURES
• Great Britain:
– Authors: Robert Burns, William Blake, William
Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary
Shelley.
– Painters: William Blake, John Constable,
Joseph Turner
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
• Often associated with the terms “American
Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism”
• Poets: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt
Whitman, Emily Dickinson
• Prose Writers: Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman
Melville.
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
• QUESTIONS:
– What distinguishes American Romanticism?
– How was AR influenced and shaped by the political
developments of the early national and ante-bellum period (circa
1820-1860)?
– What does the term “American Renaissance” (a later coinage by
literary critic F. O. Matthiesen) imply about the distinctiveness of
American Romanticism and its relationship to European
Romanticism?
– Is there any connection between AR and an emerging cultural
identity in the United States?
– How did the geographic and social landscapes of the United
States influence AR?
• The frontier, the wilderness, expansion
• Slavery, racism, sectionalism, class conflict, industrialization, gender
inequality, Indian removal, etc.
RADICAL ROMANTICISM?
• QUESTIONS:
– General: to what degree can artists/authors both
exemplify/represent and stand outside of or critique a culture at
the same time?
– Where, how, or to what degree do the writers we are
encountering sanction/affirm and/or challenge, critique, or even
subvert the spirit of the age?
– How can we appreciate radical departures from or challenges to
perceived wisdom, standard ways of thinking, political culture,
power structures, tradition, and convention?
– To what degree do these challenges still matter to us and
possibly even offer useful correctives to our own mode of
thinking and living?
– Or: where, how, and to what degree was the “Romantic
challenge” actually part of the “machine”?
– In other words, can the “establishment” ever critique itself? (E.g.
the problem of the Transcendentalists’ obvious male bias, or the
Emerson-Thoreau tension)
VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL
• The first coherent school of American art,
the Hudson River painters, helped to
shape the mythos of the American
landscape
• Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
• Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)
• Frederick Church (1826-1900)
• Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
• “
Thomas
Cole,
“The Falls
of
Kaaterskill
” (1826)
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount
Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a
Thunderstorm, 1836)
Asher
Durand,
“Kindred
Spirits”
(1848)
Asher Durand, “Kindred Spirits” (1848)
• In it Durand depicts himself, together with Cole, on a
rocky promontory in serene contemplation of the scene
before them
• In the foreground stands one of the school's famous
symbols--a broken tree stump-- what Cole called a
"memento mori“
• I.e. a reminder that life is fragile and impermanent; only
Nature and the Divine within the Human Soul are
eternal.
• Tiny as the human beings are in this composition, they
are nevertheless elevated by the grandeur of the
landscape in which they are in
Frederic Edwin
Church,
“The Natural
Bridge” (1852)
Alfred Bierstadt, “Emigrants Crossing
the Plains” (1867)
Alfred Bierstadt, “Looking Up the
Yosemite Valley” (ca. 1865-67)
VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL
• Though influenced by European Romantic painting, they
tried to define a distinct vision for American art
• Began with the grand views of the Hudson Valley and
surrounding Catskill Mountains in NY
• They celebrated the vast resources and magnificent
landscapes of the new nation (“Nature’s Nation”)
• Depicting a wilderness in which man is small in
comparison but still formed an essential element in a
divine harmony
• As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were untouched
by the hand of man--as was much of the primeval
American landscape in the early 19th century--then man
could become more easily acquainted with the hand of
God
VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL
• Influence of Transcendentalists on Hudson River
School
• Emerson had written in his 1841 essay
“Thoughts on Art” that painting should become a
vehicle through which the universal mind could
reach the mind of mankind,
• Thus: Hudson River painters believed art to be
an agent of moral and spiritual transformation.
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: THE POETRY
• William Cullen Bryant, “To a Waterfowl”
and “The Prairies”
• Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney,
“Niagara”
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of
Life” and “The Fire of Drift-wood”