Syllabus
Romanticism & Revolution
IDST-2400 (Focus: Fine Arts)

Instructor: Lynn Raley | e-mail

Meeting time: M-F 10-12

Location: AC 161

Office Hrs (AC 248): by appointment

TOPIC PROPOSAL

Your topic proposal should include a preliminary bibliography (at least 4 sources) and a paragraph that contains your thesis (which may be refined later). If you have not come up with a strong thesis yet, state in your proposal what questions you would like to answer in the process of writing your paper. Format the bibliography in Chicago style (see links online).

PAPER TOPICS

Your subject will need a specific angle, a topic within a subject in order for you to form a clear thesis. In other words, the paper should take some kind of stance toward its subject or examine a limited aspect of the subject.

For example, instead of just Napoleon (we don't need another biography: it's already been done), you might investigate some aspect of his personality, or a pivotal event where his actions changed the course of history.

The challenge is to find a focus that is narrow enough but still able to provide you with enough sources to use in your research. You Topic Proposal must be turned in with an annotated bibliography, which will show the depth and breadth of sources available to you on the subject.

Suggestion: use FIERO to generate ideas. (But realize that this volume of Fiero goes a little beyond the Romantic period, so look carefully.)

  • Napoleon (or other political or military leaders)
  • any Romantic poet, writer (Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Goethe, etc.)
  • any Romantic artist (Constable, Turner, David, etc.)
  • any Romantic composer (Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, etc.)
  • great thinkers, including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, etc.
  • some aspect of the Industrial Revolution and its effects (Dickens wrote about them in his fiction)
  • some aspect of the Romantic worldview, such as imagination, fascination with the supernatural, the subconscious, death, suicide, drugs such as opium, worship of Nature, etc.
  • Individualism and how it emerged from the Enlightenment, to be taken to an extreme in Romanticism

The most important requirement is that your paper tie in with Romantic themes and the Romantic way of viewing existence in this world. There are as many different ways to accomplish this as there are topics.

Papers from previous semesters include such topics as:

Frankenstein: Female Writers and the Search for Equality in the 19th Century
Heraldries of Darkness: Opium as the Drug of Choice for Romantics
The Romantic Era Embodied: The Life and Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Karl Marx and the Romantic Period
Beethoven as Hero
Child Labor in the Industrial Revolution in England