3.0

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The course is designed to question our assumptions about what counts as reading : what we read, to what ends and with what effects. The Romantic era (roughly 1750-1830) is particularly well suited to raise these questions, as it saw the shift to more private reading, greater social focus on literacy, new modes of mass distribution of print, as well as the cultivation of the idea of "literature." Even as so-called "literature" allied itself with print culture, it trained its audience to "read" rocks, and faces and skies, to interpret fragments and blanks, to equate reading with dreaming. Lingering in the eighteenth century for the first half of the course, we will encounter the culture of "lecture" and inscriptions, the guides to oratory and recitation, scrapbooks newspapers, and the slow move away from understanding reading as a fully embodied and shared phenomenon to an activity primarily of individual minds, with consequences that affect us still. This course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.