2010-11 | Winter Term 2
English 359 | Studies in Romanticism: Romanticism and the War on Terror
Dr. George Grinnell
Office: Arts 177
Office Hours: Thursday 2-4pm
george.grinnell@ubc.ca
Calendar Description:
Prerequisite: 3 credits of 200-level ENGL.
Course Description:
The modern concept of political terror can be dated to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror in postrevolutionary France in the 1790s. Examining the intellectual and cultural roots of the discourses
surrounding our contemporary War on Terror in the Romantic-era, this course will focus particularly
upon how terror begins as an expression of the state’s monopoly on the use of force exercised against
its own population and then shifts into what we now think of as a non-state exercise of violence
against a population. The course will examine how both of these understandings of terrorism are
linked to questions of nation, and will consider in particular how the threat of terrorism, particularly
for the British, consolidated a sense of homeland security and a nation poised to defend itself against
the threat of revolutionary violence in France.
The course will probe what terror and terrorism means and the discourses of power that shape
how this all too meaningful label is applied. Our analysis of Romantic-era texts will be framed by
historical events and concerns of the period as well as by theoretical concepts drawn from recent
critical works or 9/11, violence, and the implications of terror for post-enlightenment philosophical
concepts.
One of the guiding threads of the course will be to ask: how does the Romantic period
understand terror, and does it provide interpretations that resist the violent logic of retribution
associated with discourses of terror today? In addition to this guiding interpretative query, this course
will probe a number of other related concerns. In what ways do discourses of terror engage questions
of human rights and to what ends? Does the Romantic-era have a concept of suicide bombing even if
it did not name it as such? How does the Romantic-era’s feminization of the East and its
spectacularization of veiled Muslim women support and sustain Western perceptions of Muslim and
Arab individuals and nations today? What does it mean to make a spectacle of tortured bodies? Can
earlier forms of biometric identification tell us something about the ideological assumptions and
application of embodied forms of cross-border identification? In what ways, moreover, does the
Romantic period’s refinement of the Gothic novel speak to the individual experience of being subject
to “terror”? What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and terror? By constructing a
genealogy of terror in the Romantic period, the course will put these and other questions into play,
with a goal of developing an understanding of contemporary discourses of terror and consider the
possibility of re-activating forms of critical dissent that may have been lost or overlooked in our own
time.
Class Schedule: Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00, ART 118
Required Texts:
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France
Course Website:
https://people.ok.ubc.ca/ggrinnel/Romanticism_and_the_War_on_Terror.html
Please be advised that the course website is still a work in progress and functions best with
Firefox, Safari, or Chrome browsers.
Remaining course readings are linked below
Method of Assessment:
Participation:
Midterm
Essay Proposal
Essay
Final Exam
10%
20%
10%
35%
25%
Description of Essay Assignment
The essay should be between approximately 3-4000 words in length and requires a 500-word
proposal that will be due in week 7. The essay should situate its argument in relation to
relevant secondary sources. It may focus on texts from the course or other Romantic-era
texts, so long as it remains in some way focused upon questions of terror and its many related
concepts. Essay prompts will be circulated in week 4. Instructions regarding expectations for
the essay proposal will also be provided then.
Outline of Readings
Framing Terror
Week 1
Introductions
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html
Elizabeth Inchbald, The Massacre
Homeland (In)Security
Week 2
Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France (including “Appendix G”)
Week 3
Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace
Week 4
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, The Fall of Robespierre
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/robespierre/
Essay Proposal Instructions
Nationalism and Abjection
Week 5-6
Elizabeth Craven, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople
Midterm, February 10
Aesthetics, Terror, and the Unmaking of the Self
Week 7-8
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Essay Proposal Due, February 22
Week 9
Matthew Lewis, Castle Spectre
Week 10-11
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Essay Due, March 17
On Looking into the Face of Terror
Week 12
The Life of James Aitken, commonly called John the Painter, an Incendiary
Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy
Week 13
Percy Shelley,“The Mask of Anarchy”
http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/PShelley/anarchy.html
“Song to the Men of England”
http://www.fonseca.demon.co.uk/redwords/pages/shelleypoem.html
“England in 1819” http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1885.html
“On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci”
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/mforum.html
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY:The academic enterprise is founded on honesty, civility, and integrity. As
members of this enterprise, all students are expected to know, understand, and follow the codes of conduct
regarding academic integrity. At the most basic level, this means submitting only original work done by you and
acknowledging all sources of information or ideas and attributing them to others as required. This also means
you should not cheat, copy, or mislead others about what is your work. A more detailed description of academic
integrity, including the policies and procedures, may be found at:
http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/okanagan/index.cfm?tree=3,54,111,958
ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT:
http://okanagan.students.ubc.ca/calendar/index.cfm?tree=3,54,111,959