Resonance: Poetry and the Education of t

This course traces the origins of the expansive, non-stop processes of 21st-century capitalism and contemporary technological culture in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century.  It examines how British and German Romantic poets and critics, working between literature and philosophy, figured the crises of community occasioned by such processes in terms of a crisis of resonance, creating a poetics and ethics of resonance whereby we may re-attune ourselves to ourselves and each other in a world that often feels radically out of sync.  Beyond British and European Romanticism, we will study the global repercussions of a poetics and ethics of resonance in the writing of literary modernity in texts from East Asia and South Asia.  Readings include works of literature and art by William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schiller, Schlegel, Feng Menglong, Hu Shih, Zhou Zuoren, Nirala, Chekhov, Murakami, and Hamaguchi, and philosophical and theoretical texts by Plato, Freud, Jacques Lacan, J. L. Austin, Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, Hartmut Rosa, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Cathy Caruth, and others.