DWC 201 Final

William Wordsworth

A Romantic poet

• Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

  • the definition of Romantic poetry

  • the spontaneous overflow of emotion

• Tintern Abbey

  • Archetypal romantic poem 

  • Celebrates the new romantic religion 

  • Pantheism

  • A new kind of faith in the world of nature 

  • Expresses central attitude of Romantic Revolution 

  • Celebration of nature 

  • A morality suffused by nature 

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

• Describing a portrait of his late wife – implied that she was either killed or shut up in a convent 

• Authoritative and jealous nature 

• Her painting hidden behind a curtain – he can control when he sees it 

• Negotiating Duke’s next marriage 

• Goal to tame new wife 

Emily Dickinson

Victorian poet

Known for intentional capitalization, unusual punctuation, quatrains

Lyric poetry - seeking to convey one speaker/figure and their thoughts/emotions

Excelled in the language of surprise

Simple language

Complicated view of human nature - humans cannot enter the world of nature and that God’s spirit is not coursing through nature

Contrasts Pantheism of the Romantics

• A Bird, came down the Walk

  • Speaker enjoying nature but keeps their distance 

  • Cannot follow the bird home 

  • Illustrates dichotomy between humans and nature 

  • Nostalgia for original home in nature that we humans can no longer find 

• I like a look of Agony

  • Sadistic line that was meant to startle us

    Like the look of agony because it is genuine and can be trust

    Dickinson always invested in the authentic

• I like to see it lap the Miles

  • Expansion of the railroad

    Initially intrigued and excited

    Fundamental questions about what the train actually does

    The Iron Horse

    Loud and constantly moving

    Not actually useful

    Satirical poem

• What soft Cherubic Creatures

  • Talking about upper class women and how untouchable they are

    Their lives lack substance and meaning

    They are ashamed of Christ and do not want anything to do with redemption

    Freckled human nature – because we are all born into original sin and inherently flawed

• Because I could not stop for Death

  • Death and what happens after are two big subjects for Dickinson

    Kindness in death

    Headed for immortality in a carriage – through the stages of life

• Those Dying then

  • Ordered Christian past

    Right hand of God amputated

    Violent break between then and now

• This World is not Conclusion

  • Begins confidently stating this and then slowly becomes more uncertain

    Faith personified

    The predicament of doubt

Hard Times

Serves as criticism of the Industrial Revolution

Kierkegaard

Bridges the theological and the philosophical

Humanity straying away from traditional Christianity and the fundamental considerations of human beings towards a cultural Christianity

Kierkegaard views this as too easy and comfortable

Central Tension: How can a decision that follows the will of God be completely unethical and immoral?

Radically Individual Decisions

Abraham and Isaac

• Three Models of Existence 

1. Aesthetics: the person who lives solely for pleasure or beauty 

2. Ethical: confronting our dread rather fleeing from – Knight of Infinite Resignation – seeking to understand life as having some universal, rational, ethical standard 

3. Religious: the recognition that reason cannot encompass all that is human 

a. The Absurd: arational (without or beyond reason) 

b. A leap of faith required 

c. Knight of Faith – get the world back

Kant

Three Definitions of the Beautiful

1. Taste: the faculty of estimating an object or mode of representation by means of delight or aversion

Ability to have a disinterested pleasure

2. “The beauty that which, apart from a concept, pleases”

Ability to appreciate beauty – need to be trained to do so

Rational judgement

Freedom and determinism at the same time

Experiencing a unity and contradictories playing – the pleasure you have

At play in reason

3. “Beauty is the form of finality in an object”

No other purpose than to be what it is

Art for Art’s Sake

• Necessity + Freedom = Beauty 

• Science + Ethics = Beauty  

• True + Good = Beauty 

• Unity 

Kant - the Sublime

• A disinterested pleasure 

• Negative 

• Two kinds: 

• Mathematically sublime: so enormous that reason cannot capture it 

• Dynamically sublime: experience of something so powerful that you cannot conceptualize it 

• Pleasure you get from something so enourmous 

• Discover our freedom in the sublime  

• Freedom = the key to moral life 

Marx - Five Stages of Historical Development

• Dialectical Materialism: history understood in terms of material and economic conditions   

• Dialectical force refers to the dynamic tension or driving power created by opposing ideas, contradictions, or perspectives, which propels thought, history, or social change forward. 

• The Five Stages of Historical Development  

1. Primitive/Communal: hunter-gatherer society 

2. Master-Slave: agricultural society, land ownership for some 

3. Feudal: Lord and serf, serfs paid, working on land and give percentage to owner, still tied to land and boss, lords meant to protect sefs, class system = extremely hierarchical 

4. Capitalist (19th century begins and still remains today): class reorganization, laboring class versus owners, Bourgeois vs. The Proletariat 

Revolution at the end of the capitalist phase 

5. Socialist/Communist: revolution – everyone owns a means of production, no distinction between owner and laborer, essentially only the Proletariat 

• The Communist Solution 

• All must hold the means of production in common – production for its social utility and not for the sake of profit 

• Doing away with property 

• Success depends on unity of the proletariat 

• Criticism: Marx has a reductive view of the ends of a human person and history, misunderstanding of market forces 

Marx - Four forms of alienation caused by capitalism

1. Alienation from meaningful work: to have control over the product of one’s labor 

2. Alienation from the activity of working itself: work is a reflection of the owner, not the worker 

3. Alienation from each other: competition breeds suspicion and selfishness between workers and between capitalists – pinning workers against each other 

4. Alienation from nature: nature is reduced to an object that sustains life, it is not the habitat we live in or spring form 

Pollution, deforestation, an object we become Masters and Possessors of   

Utilitarianism (Mill)

• Application of Newtonian principles to morality  

• Forces: pleasure and pain 

• A society wide approach to thinking about morality 

• Most contemporary institutions are utilitarian 

• Bentham = father of utilitarianism 

• Moral action considered good or bad depending on the amount of pleasure caused or created 

• The Hedonic Calculus: calculates the amount of pleasure or pain caused by an action to determine the ‘goodness’ of an action 

• John Stuart Mill 

• Adopts Bentham’s principle of utility – actions should be aimed at causing the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people  

• Added in qualities to the Hedonic Calculus   

• Quality vs. Quantity of Pleasure  

• Choose quality over quantity 

• Abstracts two moral values:  

• The value of the human being 

• Natural relationships 

Paintings

Come back

French Revolution

• 1789-1799 

• Causes  

  • Growing resentment against privileges of birth and estate 

  • Unfair, insufficient system of taxation 

  • Growing national debt 

  • Ailing French economy 

  • Intellectual impact of the Enlightenment 

    • Rousseau 

  • Weak Monarch Louis XVI 

• Failure of Royal Reform  

• The Estates General 

• Tennis Court Act – first act of revolution – June 1789 

Swear they alone are the elected body in France and swear to write a constitution, members of Third Estate + some progressive cleargy and nobles 

• The National Assembly 

• Storming the Bastille 

• The Great Fear 

• The August Decrees 

• Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen 

• October Days 

• Limits on Roman Catholic Church 

• Declining Role of King 

• First Republic Established 

• The Republic – Committee of Public Safety - Robespierre 

• The Reign of Terror 

• Execution of the King, January 1793 

• Thermidorean Reaction 1794-1795 

• The Directory 1795-1799 

Impressionism

• 1870s 

• Art for Art’s Sake – loyalty to the Canvas  

• Break with 4 centuries of western art 

• Canvas as 2D screen to display light and color 

• Ignore/forget all you see, paint shapes and colors as they appear to you as they appear in that particular moment – subjective and nave impression of light and color in a particular moment 

• Traits 

  • Comparatively small in size 

  • Bright colors 

  • Broken brushwork 

  • Very few tonal contrasts – flat images 

  • Impression Sunrise 

  • Le Lecture 

• Conclusion: Shift from objective reality to the subjective sense

Romanticism

• A new world view 

• New poetic style celebrating the creative power of the human imagination 

• Pantheism: immanent (all around us, esp. In nature) 

• About the individual 

• Interior life 

• Emotion, feeling, intuition 

• Intention of Romantic poetry – pleasure 

• Lyric poems  

• Rejection of the Industrial Revolution 

William Blank

• Not a romantic poet but a precursor 

• Devout Christian 

• Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire Rousseau 

  • Target: Voltaire & Rousseau = Enlightenment rationalism. 

  • Message: Mocking faith is futile; divine truth endures. 

  • Imagery: Sand vs. wind → futility; gems in light → spiritual vision. 

  • Contrast: Reason/materialism vs. imagination/spirituality. 

  • Significance: Blake defends faith and vision against Enlightenment skepticism. 

• London

  • Exposes social and political opperession in 18th century London 

  • Speaker wandering through the streets   

  • The ‘mind forg’d manacles’ - psychological, social chain 

  • All has gone wrong because of human laws and impositions  

  • Chimney sweep and soldiers as victims of church o state  

  • Even love is lost  

  • Someone consorting with young prostitutes – brings back a disease and the baby is plagued 

John Keats

Romantic Poet

• To Autumn 

• Sheer celebration of autumn in different stages with all five senses – exhibiting beauty and sheer abundance 

Liberalism vs. Conservatism

L - Promotes liberty and equality of the individuals

C - hierarchical but paternalistic government, rejects revolution and Enlightenment

Transcendentalism

• 1830s – the Civil War 

• Emerson = major spokesperson 

• Optimism and Idealism – aspects of Romanticism it was influenced by 

• intuition 

• Self Reliance: “Imitation is Suicide,” “envy is ignorance”   

• Individualism 

• “Build therefore your own world” 

• “The world is nothing, man is all” 

• Truth is not found institutions or pure reason, but in the individual’s intuition, imagination, and direct connection to nature and the divine 

Industrialization

• 1780-1790 = takeoff point in Britain 

• Why? 

  • Increased crop yields 

  • Growth of the cottage industry 

  • Atlantic trade produced surplus capital 

  • New canals and roads 

  • Increased demand for cotton textiles = the trigger 

• Slower to move to Europe and US

• Effect on Production

  • Creation of the factory systems and mills 

  • Steam engines 

  • Boom in iron production 

  • Explosion of coal mines 

• Effects on Society

  • Urbanization 

  • Many issues – lack of quality house, resources, jobs, sanitization 

  • Poor planning, no social institutions, pollution, limited church attendance, breakdown of the traditional household, crime

• Hands in Hard Times: reduction of a person to its function 

• Formation of the Working Class – horrible conditions 

• Factory Act of 1833 = first regulations in Britain 

• Sharpening of distinctions based on wealth

Civil War

• Difference between the North and the South 

• Different types of agricultural activity 

  • North: smaller farms, family, climate and rocky soil, larger cities 

  • South: large plantations with longer growing season, cash crops – sugar, cotton, tobacco – not for subsistence but for sale 

• Different economic activity 

  • N: industrializing, urbanizing – factories, railroads, favor higher tariffs 

  • S: the dominant producer of cotton for the world, propelling Southern economy 

• Different systems of labor 

  • N: factories, using cheap but free wage labor – German and Irish 

  • S: slave labor, in 1860 = 4,000,000 slaves, ‘peculiar institution,’ 25% of southern whites own slaves 

• 1860: France and Britain had extinguished slavery in their colonies 

• Arguments defending slavery: paternalist institution, God’s providence, Christianization 

• Election of 1860: Lincolns becomes president 

  • Had a deep moral aversion to slavery, a Christian 

  • Final straw for southern states – seceding in Dec. 1860 and spring ‘61 

• Civil War 1861-1865 

  • Initial Objectives: preserve the union even if that means keeping slavery 

  • Jefferson Davis: leader of the confederacy – wants recognition from nations of Europe 

  • Battle of Antietam 

• Why did the North win? 

  • Superior population 

  • Union naval blockade 

  • Dissolution of south unity after 1863 partially due to gap between slave owning elite and poor white soldiers 

  • Slavery  

  • Appomattox Court  

• Reconstruction 

  • Lincoln assassinated and Jackson made president\ 

  • Andrew Johnson’s Plan (1865): After Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson offered amnesty to southerners who swore allegiance; states had to end slavery (13th Amendment) to rejoin the Union. 

  • Black Codes: Southern states imposed restrictive laws that maintained racial subordination and laid groundwork for sharecropping. 

  • Radical Reconstruction: In response to Black Codes, Congress passed the 14th Amendment (equal rights) and the 15th Amendment (voting rights), though southern resistance limited effectiveness. 

  • Federal Enforcement (1865–1877): Southern states were occupied to enforce Reconstruction, but protection ended with the 1877 political deal withdrawing troops. 

  • Jim Crow Era (1877–1965): Segregation laws re-emerged; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld “separate but equal,” entrenching inequality. 

The Year of 1848

• The turning point at which modern history failed to turn 

• Most important year of the 19th century for western civilization 

• Revolutions all failed 

• A basic pattern of revolution 

1. Political agenda = largely nationalist and liberal – brought demands for political changes – middle class and working class together because both wanted economic change 

2. Two groups diverge and political middle class crush the working class – bloodshed – middle class satisfied and no longer need to rebel 

3. A conservative reaction, new agenda and coalition of middle class and aristocrats stemming the revolution and protecting property rights 

• Began in France

  • Outbreak: King Louis‑Philippe resisted expanding voting rights (only 3% eligible). 

  • Provisional Government: Universal male suffrage; socialist Louis‑Blanc pushed National Workshops (employment aid). 

  • June Days: Brutal suppression of worker revolt; class conflict exposed. 

  • Outcome: Louis‑Napoleon elected (name recognition, peasant support); by 1851 declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. 

• Austria

  • Student-led uprisings in Vienna, crushed in October 

  • Franz Joseph became emperor at 18, ruling for 68 years 

• German States

  • Liberal revolutions (Feb–March 1848); students/professors demanded rights. 

  • Frankfurt Assembly debated constitution but divided (Great vs. Little Germans). 

  • King of Prussia rejected “crown from the gutter.” 

  • Liberal hopes collapsed; conservative repression followed 

• Britain

  • Chartist movement (1839, revived 1848) demanded suffrage and reforms. 

  • Rejected; Britain avoided revolution due to gradual political change. 

• Overall

  • Revolutions failed  

  • Nationalism and liberalism split 

  • German and Italian unification through ‘blood and iron,’ not liberal reform 

  • Inspired but frustrated working-class movements 

The Brothers Karamazov

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