MEETING TIMES
Thursdays, 4-6:30 pm
DH Lab Lucy Stern 101
Final Exam Friday, December 13, 4:00 pm–6:30 pm
INSTRUCTOR
Professor Kirsten T. Saxton
ktsaxton@mills.edu
Mills Hall 306
Office hours
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
wild, adj.
- (of an animal or plant) living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated or cultivated.
“a herd of wild goats”
synonyms: untamed, undomesticated, feral; - (of a place or region) uninhabited, uncultivated, or inhospitable.
“an expanse of wild moorland”
synonyms: uninhabited, unpopulated, uncultivated, unfarmed, unmanaged, virgin;
wild, noun
- a natural state or uncultivated or uninhabited region.
This course takes up what is termed the Romantic century of British literature (1750-1850), a time of rapid (some might say, wild) political and cultural revolutions. In this course we will interrogate, as the Romantics did, notions of the Wild.
What is wild? What are the aesthetics of the Wild? What are the politics of the Wild?
As a class, we will not attempt to categorize nor define the wild, either as the Romantics understood it then or how we understand it today; rather, we will explore how Romantic literature allows us to interrogate the uses of “the wild”: to form further questions and stage interventions to contemporary conversations about wildness.
How did catastrophe and social shifts provoke Romantic writers to imagine new forms of community? How might we learn from these provocations/responses?
We will consider the intersections of large and small revolutions, turning points, and moments, including political revolutions and revolutions of manners, science, and industry.
We will muse on the ways in which poets of the era engage with notions of the ethical, the fantastic, the nation, resistance, spiritualism, sympathy, and sex. We focus on ideas about nature, climate, limits of the human, and the roles of the writer and artist in the political project.
We will look at poetry, drama, film, and fiction from canonical and lesser known writers from the Romantic era through the present. We’ll move through poems about mermaid worlds, elegies for a lost wild, tracts for vegetarianism, postcolonial poetic interrogations of nature poems, video games about alternative worlds, and contemporary fictions about the ends of the world as we know it.
The class is informed by critical race theory, queer theory, feminist theory, and disability theory; we will consider the particular uses of presentism and theories of vulnerability, disability, animal theory and aesthetics.
The online graduate lab offers in depth readings in these areas, and the texts for that lab will be available to all, but not required for anyone not in the Graduate 4 unit section.
REQUIRED TEXTS
All texts will be provided as links on the Schedule.
WILD romantics 