76-831 Narratives of Profession

Units: 9, 12 Department: English Cross-listed: 76-431 Related URLs: http://hss.cmu.edu/HTML/departments/engl Why was religiosity--often of an unorthodox or dissident kind--so crucial for Romantic writers from William Blake to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and so pivotal for the radical politics of this era? This course will consider a range of religious, spiritualist, and materialist postures that Romantic-age writers believed to be central to literary, scientific, political, and cultural understandings. These include Blake's "enthusiasm," William Wordsworth's "pantheism," Joseph Priestley's "thinking matter," Coleridge's "Spinozism" and later his symbolic Protestantism, Anna Barbauld's Dissenting unitarianism, Shelley's "atheism," and others. In addition to reading texts of the period in their cultural contexts, we will also explore some provocative theoretical ways of thinking about the symbolic and social consequences of religion for modernity: in the sociology of religion (Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu), anthropology (Clifford Geertz, Rene Girard), philosophy and rhetoric (Jacques Derrida, Kenneth Burke).

Popularity index Rank for this semester: #1132 Rank in this department: #68   Students also scheduled 76-850 Foucalt 76-838 Stars and Celebrity 76-833 Sociology of Culture

Spring 2005 times

Sec	Time	Day	Instructor	Location
A	7:00 - 9:50 pm	R	Williams	BH 231B