English 274 - The Pleasures of Not Thinking: Romanticism and the Irrational

Romantic writers were obsessed with uncertainty, ignorance, and the irrational, unthinking mind. Concerned with the unusual ideas that surface when we are sleeping or spaced out, absorbed or intoxicated, Romanticism embraced reason’s alternatives: forgetting, fragmentation, stupidity, and spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. From Wordsworth’s suggestion that children are wiser than adults to Keats’s claim that great writers are capable of remaining uncertain without reaching for fact or reason, Romantic poets and novelists suggested that we have something to learn from not thinking. We will read texts by Austen, Blake, Burke, Coleridge, Cowper, De Quincey, Freud, Kant, Keats, Locke, and Rousseau.