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Romantic Landscape
English 233, Fall 2001, Alan Liu
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In
Romantic poetry: nature and self. In Romantic painting: landscape
and portrait. The relation of nature-writing to self-writing and of
landscape to portrait is in many ways definitive of the Romantic moment
in the British arts (a moment itself descended from the 18th-century
use of landscape to portray identity against the backdrops of household,
estate, and state). This course attends to the specificity of Romantic
landscape in the so-called British "long 18th century" or
(in art history) "great century"–i.e., to the unique
contribution of Romanticism to an era when in great part landscape
was art and art was landscape. Rivaled perhaps only by the novel,
with which it was on intimate terms, landscape was the epic of the
times. It was the familiar of that other great Romantic epic form:
autobiography.
This
course concentrates on the writings the Wordsworth circle (William,
Dorothy, and Coleridge) and the paintings and watercolors of John
Constable and J.M.W. Turner. These materials are developed against
a backdrop that includes 18th-century writers and painters, the aesthetic
theories of the picturesque and sublime, and the history and theory
of "descriptive" genres (including georgic and locodescription).
The course also includes a contemporary unit on late 20th-century
"land artists," particularly the "new romantic"
nature installations of Andy Goldsworthy and performance or sculptural
"walks" of Richard Long. A final unit is devoted to the
question, "What is Landscape? (From "Natural" to Technological
and Media Determinations of Landscape)." The purpose of this
final unit of the course is to foreground experimental approaches
to the concept of landscape–including anthropological, evolutionary-psychological,
ecocritical, geographical, and technological hypotheses (e.g., the
work of Jay Appleton, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch; the images
produced by the Landsat 7 satellite).
A
major goal of the course is to lure literature students into seeing
the writing and painting of the era as part of a single palette (and
thus to gain some visual literacy in the multimedia arts of the time).
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