Romantic Cookbook due 5/5

Due 5/5—to be read in class, last session.

Romantic Cookbook

Let’s take one last imprint of British Romantic practice by trying it out ourselves. Write a minimum of 500 words, prose or verse or a combination (for the latter, you might write a letter in, say, the Coleridge or Keats mode, mixing the two).

Use one or more of the moves listed below, bearing in mind that they often overlap and are articulated together—e.g., childhood with Nature with Imagination; e.g., the Sublime with liberty with Imagination, etc. 1-6 are structural nuclei. Following them you have a motifs menu.

Cook it up your way--spicy hot, subtle and elegant, whatever your taste--but try to give it unity.

2 options:

1. Give it a title, a date, a dedication, and a literary style as if you are writing it back in 1798, 1807, 1818.

2. Or move it into today’s context and idiom. That is, write it in a postmodern voice/style.


Structural nuclei

1.Out-in-out: outward view of an aspect or object in Nature appearing lifeless; inward turn to feeling and imagination regarding the object; return to outward view of Nature as animated, flowing with mind and feeling, offering unity, joy, the divine, a “revolution” of mind and spirit.

2. Story of les miserables: description of a peasant, beggar, one of the world’s forgotten and humble people, followed by a deepened appreciation of the person’s worth, what the person teaches about things like oppression and liberty, love and generosity, nature and imagination.

3. The child: the child or one’s own childhood lost and then found again, serving as avenue to recovering imagination, “the innocent eye,” nature, joy.

4. The Sublime: gazing upon the high mountains, the raging sea, or pulled into some vortex of trance or dream, the sublime as avenue to supercharging the sense of imagination and nature, as avenue to escaping the bonds of mental and spiritual imprisonment and breaking through to liberty. Or it moves into the Gothic Sublime—terrifying materiality and mechanical repetition, vacancy, abyss, engulfment, dissolution rather than  transcendent-organic synthesis.

5. The journey or quest to wild lands, the sublime in the mix but Oriental and other faraway- Gothic strains accompanying the quest.

6. A pair of contraries are run through their paces and then are resolved/synthesized or brought to a point of impossibility.death/vacancy/disaster.


Motifs

Snakes
Poet
Flowers
Monster, exile, wanderer
Moon and Sun
Clouds
Fire
Dynamics: very soft, very loud
Winds
Revolution
Cataracts, waterfalls
Lovers
Reflections--water, echoes, etc
Mountain top
Journey to the strange, crisis and transformation.
Exclamations
Ruins
London
Hellenism, images of the ancient world
Fog and mist
Nightingale or other bird
Shadows
Fountains
War
Sleep, dream, swoon, trance
Ship
Strings, harps, lyres, flutes
Ghosts, phantoms, fairies
Death
“Orient,” arabesque, non-Western
Guilty thing
Common man
Liberty
Woman—beloved, lost or imprisoned girl, femme fatale.
Imagination
Sorcery, forbidden knowledge, science
Inter-- (fused, etc.)
Vacancy, blank, abyss , oscillation
Absorption, dissolution