Online Seminar Series: The Romantic Eye/I

Online Seminar Series

The Romantic I/Eye

Sunday, October 20, 2024

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A pan-European and American phenomenon, Romanticism influenced Western notions about the individual as well as humans’ relationship to nature. This series of online seminars addresses both themes through a variety of genres and nationalities, most of which texts are written in the first person. How did the Romantic Era shape the notion of what a subject is?  Does first-person writing, in seeming to explore the subject or the self, reveal it or make it more obscure? To what extent does the choice an author makes to portray an experience through the use of the first person affect that experience, and do these authors’ texts coalesce into a coherent portrait of the Romantic period? Finally, how do these singular voices engage with nature, particularly under the looming shadow of the Industrial Revolution?

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Readings in the Series (ISBNs and Posted PDFs will added soon):

Goethe — The Sorrows of Young Werther
Rousseau — Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Holderlin — Hyperion
Wordsworth — The Prelude (Two-Part 1799 version)
Chateaubriand — Rene, and Atala
Foscolo — The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Byron — Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto One
Hazlitt — On the Love of the Country, On Living to One’s Self, and On Thought and Action
Müller/Schubert — Die Winterreise
Pushkin — Eugene Onegin
Emerson — Nature, The Over-Soul, and Circles
Poe — The Landscape Garden, William Wilson, and The Fall of the House of Usher

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Join us as we read explore these readings, with sessions about one month apart. Click here to visit The Romantic I/Eye Online Seminar page, with links to media and the Discussion Forum.

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October 20 Reading:

Pushkin — Eugene Onegin

Princeton University Press (July 2018)

ISBN 978-0691181011​

As a character in the film Paterson says, ‘Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with your raincoat on.’  In choosing Nabokov’s translation, we picked the one that we thought tried the hardest to put across Pushkin’s meaning as completely as it can be; unlike Pushkin’s original, however, Nabokov’s translation is not only not intricately rhymed, but not rhymed at all.  For your delectation, therefore, we post a pdf of another translation, Mitchell’s, which is rhymed.  If you have a chance, sample Mitchell a little.

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Schedule:

12:00-2:00PM PDT

Tutors:

Jordan Hoffman and Eric Stull

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Location:

Online. Register to receive the link.