ENGL 6455

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  • Schedule of Classes - January 19, 2016 6:14PM EST
  • Course Catalog - January 19, 2016 6:21PM EST

ENGL 6455
Romanticism and the Life of Things

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

"Up to the end of the eighteenth century, life does not exist," writes Michel Foucault in The Order of Things. The provocation means not that life on Earth began at 1800, but rather that only then do living things start to cut a unique profile in the history of human knowledge, motivating a dedicated science (biology) and new theories of nature, labor and language. This course will focus on the problem of life and the rhetoric of animation in the poetry, prose, and theory of Romanticism – asking not least how literary techniques of "becoming-thing" challenge the culture of life by hewing close to the commodity, the ruin, the rock, and the slave. Mostly English and German literature, with readings in rhetoric, biopolitics, ecocriticism, and materialism.

When Offered Fall.

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Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • 16537 ENGL 6455   SEM 101

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