Romanticism - stegen.k12.mo.us moral clarity, and healthful living. To a large degree, Romanticism...
Transcript of Romanticism - stegen.k12.mo.us moral clarity, and healthful living. To a large degree, Romanticism...
American
Romanticism1800 - 1870
We will walk with our own feetwe will work with our own handswe will speak our own minds
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT
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.
Rationalism vs. Romanticism
The rationalists believed the city to be a place to find success and self-realization
The romantics associated the countryside with independence, moral clarity, and healthful living.
To a large degree, Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment or
Age of Reason, especially its emphasis on formal propriety (what is proper),
classical style (emphasis on order), and decorum (how one behaviors; certain
rules of behavior; think on Franklin’s 13 virtues to moral perfection).
Historical Background
Optimism
Successful revolt against English rule
Room to grow
Frontier
Vast expanse
Freedom
No geographic limitations
Characteristics The Five I’s
Imagination
Intuition
Idealism
Inspiration
Individuality
Characteristics Expanded
Values feeling and intuition over reason
Places faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination
Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature
Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication
Champions individual freedom and the worth of the individual
Contemplates nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development
Characteristics (continued)
Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and distrusts progress
Finds beauty and truth in exotic locals, the supernatural realm, and the inner world of the imagination
Sees poetry as the highest expression of the imagination
Finds inspiration in myth, legend, and fold culture
Subject Matter
Quest for beauty
Escape from daily troubles
Journey to freedom, represented in nature as opposed to the oppressive city
Use of far-away, imaginative settings
Supernatural, myth, legend & folklore
Literary Techniques
Remote settings
Improbable plots
Experimentation in new forms of writing
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT
Expanded 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
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
ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT
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
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
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 life-force
Sub-Movements of Romanticism
Gothicism
Washington Irving
“Rip Van Winkle”
Edgar Allan Poe
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“The Raven”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The Minister’s Black Veil”
Sub-Movements of Romanticism
Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nature”
“Self-Reliance”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
“Resistance to Civil Government”
American Gothic: The Realm of Darkness
Edgar Allen Poe with Hawthorne and Melville known and anti-Transcendentalists
Explored conflicts between good and evil, psychological effects of guilt and sin, and madness
Transcendentalism
The idea that in determining the ultimate reality of God, the universe, the self, and other important matters, one must transcend, or go beyond, everyday human experience in the physical world.
Romantic Poets
William Cullen Bryant“Thanatopsis”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow“The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls”
“The Cross of Snow”
Oliver Wendell Holmes“The Chambered Nautilus”
Romantic Poets
Emily Dickinson
“Heart! We will forget him!”
“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”
Walt Whitman
“I Hear America Singing”
Song of Myself
Romantic Art
Visual Art: Examples
Bibliography
This PowerPoint is a combination of slides from three online PowerPoints.
SOURCES:
project810.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/romanticism.ppt
www.newauburn.k12.wi.us/english/amerlit/Romaticism.ppt
www.westga.edu/.../Powerpoint%20Presentations/AMERICAN%20ROMANTICISM.ppt