ROMANTICISM and REVOLUTION
COURSE SUMMARY

Barnum Week: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Cloquet Week: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Change and life in the 19th Century

Revolutionary change has characterized the experience of human beings for the last two centuries. To understand such change and its impacts on the life and art of our times we need to look backward to the nineteenth century and the emergence of new industrial technology and new theories about human nature and technology; theories so revolutionary that they continue to ground our arguments about the orgins of humankind, the nature of mind and the structure of human societies. The revolutions in our view of what it means to be human grow from the the industrial revolution, and the intellectual work of Romantic artists, poets, and philosophers and Victorian scientists, particularly, Darwin, Marx and Freud.

Assignment 1: The discussion guide for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein asked you to think about the popularity of the story of Dr. Frankenstein's monster in the twentieth century. The guide for your first posting exercise asks you to consider the results of your discussion and explore some fo the questions arising from that discussion.

We start by examining art and poetry by William Blake. Blake's reactions to eighteenth century revolutions in America and France signaled the beginning of new kinds of English art, poetry and philosophy, work that demonstrates the way in which the ideas of the American Revolution are rooted in 18th century European notions of freedom and equality, ideas which Europe learned, in part, from the Alqounquin speaking peoples of the Americas. At the same time we will explore a story, imagined early in the nineteenth century and continually reimagined during the twentieth, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.If exploring the stories we tell ourselves is one of the ways to come to understand who we are, then this is a story we've been telling ourselves so continuously since 1818; we will not understand ourselves unless we explore it. To understand Romanticism and the roots of revolutions we will need to understand Shelley's story of a "Modern Prometheus".

The Romantics seemed to be obsessed with the story of Prometheus. We'll look at versions of the story from Percy Shelley, Byron and Goethe. A brief tour of famous poems by the English Romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats will enrich your sense of the dreams and passions that fired the revolutions in mind that grew from the political revolutions of first half of the 19th century. One aspect of those revolutions that anticipates issues that concern us now was the emergence of women's liberation movements. Responding to ideas emerging from the French Revolution, Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft and her father, William Godwin are early participants in thismovement. John Stuart Mill and his friend and eventual wife, Harriet Taylor join these early thinkers in developing the philosophic basis for the new notions of liberty and equality emerging from the Romantics. Their thinking and writing influenced the Pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin the artist/philosopher whose life work became a search for justice for those forced to live in the cities and factories developing from the industrial revolution. His work moves us from the Romantics to the Victorians

Later in the century, "Dover Beach" a poem by Mathew Arnold, questions whether the progress of the nineteenth century will continue into the twentieth century, and gives us some sense of the profound sense of unease that most late nineteenth century intellectuals felt as they faced the coming century.Alfred Lord Tennyson suggests a similar view of the emergence of the modern period in "Ulysses". The aging hero of the poem and of the Western European tradition laments the passing of a heroic age and calls for one more voyage to find one more new world, one more setting where the old ways will still allow men to be heroic. Later in the course we will read another of Tennyson's poems praising the heroic age he sees passing.

19th Century Ideas - The Roots of Revolution

Charles Darwin's theory of human evolution, set forth in our selection from his 1871 Descent of Man is one of the great ideas emerging from the nineteenth century and shaping the twentieth century. Because Darwin's theories raise fundamental questions about the nature of human beings they continue to create controversy even at the end of the twentieth century. Darwin's scientific theories are fundamental to modern biological/environmental work. Biologists continue to develop Darwin's theory of evolution today.

Karl Marx was the leading theorist of political revolution and evolution of the nineteenth century. With Fredrick Engels he authored the Communist Manifesto. Even though the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has collapsed, Marx's theories still are the philosophical foundation for most of the world's revolutionaries. The opening sections and the final paragraph of the Manifesto are part of your readings.

As revolutionary as the biological theories of Darwin and the political theories of Marx are, some would say the most revolutionary theory to emerge from the nineteenth century was Sigmund Freud's theory of human personality. We will look at a relatively late statement of his theories in a selection from Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud's analysis of the price human beings pay for living in the "civilized" world offers one explanation for the incredible violence that has characterized the lives of individuals and nations throughout the twentieth century. Freud's approach was to analyze dreams to understand the emotional life and responses of individual human beings One of Freud's colleagues, Carl Jung, used same basic approach to try to discover the relationships between the stories we tell ourselves, in all cultures and at all times, and the dreams of nations and people. Jung's theories have been of special interest to musicians, artists and writers and we will use some of his work in our discussions of various materials in this course.

Colonialism and Its Rationales

Implicit in these theories are notions which supported one of the most troublesome geopolitical legacies of the nineteenth century, colonialism, with its attendant problems of racism, exploitation, and oppression. One of the first writers to raise serious questions about what colonialism was doing to the masters of the various European empires was Joseph Conrad, whose novel, Heart of Darkness raises such questions.

Conrad's novel explores colonialism and its attendant problems with such insight that Francis Coppola used it as the basis forApocalypse Now. Coppola's film about the United States involvement in Vietnam suggest the war is a continuation of European colonialism in Southeast Asia. The film also explores the problems of war and violence in the twentieth century, a century which is arguably the bloodiest inhuman history.

Musical Responses to Revolution

While there are many ways in which music has been related to revolutions of every kind during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, none is more direct than the way protest music has served to speak directly to ordinary people, calling them to fight against injustices in their own situations or to support such revolutions in other parts of the world. Such music has become especially prevalent in popular music, the music listened to by ordinary people during the past fifty years. During the 1960s such music became a major influence in popular culture world wide. Since the 1990s some of the most interesting protest music is being written an performed by women and reflect the increasing awareness of women about their contributions to the culture of the people.

Philosophic Responses to Revolution

Existentialism is the major new philosophic perspective to emerge from the bloody wars and revolutions that have resulted from the colonialism, racism and sexism of this century. It is a philosophy that has emerged as much from art, drama and literature as it has from philosophic writings, and its formulations have been as various as its proponents. There are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, atheist and agnostic existentialists like Sartre and Camus, and some of Existentialism's tenets are rooted in Buddhist and Taoist precepts. Jean Paul Sartre's The Wall and Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus provide two examples of the existentialist approach to understanding the human condition in the face of scientific theory in biology and psychology which suggest that all choices are determined and the experience of many individuals in increasingly complex societies which seem to restrict human freedom. These factors suggest humans do not chose their actions and are controlled by forces outside of themselves. Existentialism rejects such views, and makes the case for choice.

Artistic Responses to Revolution

One of the many artistic movements of the twentieth century which responded to the revolutionary changes, violence and warfare is Surrealism In many ways the Surrealists raised fundamental questions about the nature of reality, human folly and the limits of science and progress, that are the central legacy of modern art and literature.

An understanding of the perspective of the Surrealists is best obtained by looking at the works of some of the founders of the Surrealist movement, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Salvador Dali.

The Indigenous Response

The problems of colonialism and racism continue to plague all the countries of the world. Here in our own region of the United States problems involving the fishing and hunting rights of Native Americans and the sovereign rights of various tribes to gambling revenues, confuse and alarm many Americans of European origin. Issues such as these are not new. In fact as various native civil rights movements unfolded all over the world during the twentieth century, Native Americans fought for their rights. The film, Thunderheart, treats one instance of that fight. The events that are a basis for the film are summarized at a web site dedicated to freeing Leonard Peltier

Voices of Liberation

Not only have indigenous people fought for recognition of their sovereign rights but minorities and women have been seeking equal treatment throughout the century. In America the black minority which suffered the outrages of slavery has made an all ot effort to establish the black community as a defining focus for American diversity. The centrality of African Americans in the history of the United States certainly justifies this focus. In the civil rights movement black Americans, led by Martin Luther King set new standards for non-violent confrontaton of racism and predjudice. Similarly, the history of nineteenth and twentieth centuries women from all over the world have worked to free women from the the sexism of male dominated cultures.

Voices in Literature

Twentieth century literature has addressed the problems people face in a rapidly changing world in a wide variety of ways. We've already considered literary responses to war and have and will consider problems related to colonialism, racism and sexism. But literature is about more than political and philosophical issues. In modern and contemporary American and British literature the twentieth century is a period of great richness and variety, but equally important is the emergence of other literatures written in English and the widespread translation of literature written in other languages.

A Universal Response - A Path to Liberation

One of the major responses to the exploitation, war and violence of the twentieth century has been the emergence of non-violence as a way to respond to overcome colonialism, racism and sexism. The man who taught the twentieth century this lesson is Mahatma Ghandi. The film version of the story of his life is the final focus of our explorations of the non-violent response to colonialism, racism, sexism and war.

For chronolgies that may help you relate the historical events of the nineteenth and twentieth century with works of art and each other click here.

• Chronologies
• Modernism Timeline

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota. This web page (http://www.d.umn.edu/ ~tbacig/revolt/) is maintained by Tom Bacig, and was last updated Wednesday, 22-Jan-2014 13:13:23 CSTSend comments to tbacig@d.umn.edu.