The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And this spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

-Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner


Romantic poets wrote to the world at a time when printing and marketing practices were undergoing drastic upheavals. As a result, they were particularly unsettled about who their audience might be, and how that audience might receive the text. Some romantics anxiously tried to define reader engagement, while others found new freedom in the unpredictability of address.

Our seminar will concentrate on a few poems representing important aspects of British romanticism. We'll read them closely to reconstruct their fantasies about audience, trace their actual adventures of publication, bring in deconstructive and cultural analysis of distorted reception, and finally consider new representations on the Internet. The Web, after all, is starting to shake up the shape and distribution of texts in ways that the romantics never dreamed. Or did they? What happens to Wordsworth's poet, a "man talking to men," when the "talk" is cut into screens and the "men" are browsing? How might hyperlinks bear out Blake's prophesy of "a torn book"? What happens to the Shelleyan vision of poetry as "ashes and sparks," now that we can effortlessly store, retrieve, and reconfigure?

The course will be divided up into segments, in which we trace the dispersal of poetry in key works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Byron. The final segment of the course will be devoted to the Women of the Romantic Period [WORP] Project, a key reassessment of romanticism by way of the Internet. Students will write numerous short interpretations of poems and theory, as well as Web site reviews. Each student will also develop a special project, in which the dimensions of a new Web site representing romantic poems are proposed, argued for, and compared to past publication.

No deep knowledge of the Internet is needed: we'll confine our activities to browsing, reading, and theorizing. But regular access to email and the Web is a requirement for the course.

Texts include:

Wordsworth & Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
Romantics Unbound Project (NYIT)
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Coleridge on the Internet (U Virginia)
Blake, Poems of Innocence & Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
America: A Prophecy
The Romantic Text / Electronic Text Project (Florida)
Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, "A Defence of Poetry"
Byron, Don Juan
Women of the Romantic Period [WORP] Project (U Texas)

Critical articles by Walter Benjamin, Jerome McGann, Peter Manning, Tilottama Rajan, William St. Clair, Jerome Christensen, Alan Liu, and Laura Mandell.