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 one is 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 one has something to learn from not thinking. Students read texts by Austen, Blake, Burke, Coleridge, Cowper, De Quincey, Freud, Kant, Keats, Locke and Rousseau.