Summary of the research material

The Enlightenment - intellectual movement

They believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their principal targets were religion (embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the domination of society by a hereditary aristocracy.

Michel de Montaigne

If we cannot be certain that our values are God-given, then we have no right to impose them by force on others.

This shift toward cultural relativism ... is one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment....

Enlightenment thinkers used the examples of other cultures to gain the freedom to reshape not only their philosophies, but their societies.

The ability of individual effort to transform the world became a European dogma, lasting to this day

they thought that educated and sophisticated persons could be brought to see through the exercise of their reason that the world could and should be greatly improved.

The Enlightenment had weakened the hold of Christianity over society to the extent

The 17th Century

To be sure, logic alone (empiricism..?..) could be used to defend all sorts of absurd notions; and Enlightenment thinkers insisted on combining it with something they called "reason" which consisted of common sense, observation (Critique of pure reason), and their own unacknowledged prejudices in favor of skepticism and freedom.

The Political and Economic Background ( what were the conditions for enlightenment to appear ( but it‘s not a cult .soc. backrounf in which romanticism came out)

During the late Middle Ages, peasants had begun to move from rural estates to the towns in search of increased freedom and prosperity. As trade and communication improved during the Renaissance, the ordinary town-dweller began to realize that things need not always go on as they had for centuries. New charters governments laws businesses could be begun.

SO the pressure for change continued to mount.

These merchants had their own ideas about the sort of world they wanted to inhabit, and they became major agents of change, in the arts, in government, and in the economy.

Whereas individualism had been chiefly emphasized in the Renaissance by artists, s, it now became a core value..

chief obstacles were absolutist kings and dogmatic churches....

individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as core European values.

This is the background of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Europeans were changing, but Europe's institutions were not keeping pace with that change

Most important, the middle classes--the bourgeoisie--were painfully aware that they were paying taxes to support a fabulously expensive aristocracy which contributed nothing of value to society

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Rousseau vs. Voltaire

Voltaire insisted on the supremacy of the intellect, Rousseau emphasized the emotions, becoming a contributor to both the Enlightenment and its successor, romanticism

The Struggle in Europe

Voltaire and his allies in France, struggling to assert the values of freedom and tolerance in a culture where the twin fortresses of monarchy and Church opposed almost everything they stood for.

Voltaire was joined by a band of rebellious thinkers known as the philosophes: Charles de Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle, Jean d'Alembert

The Heritage of the Enlightenment

the perfect society could be built on common sense and tolerance, a fantasy which collapsed amid the Terror of the French Revolution and the triumphal sweep of Romanticism.

The notions of human rights it developed

Romanticism

Romanticism was more widespread both in its origins and influence

Beginning in Germany and England in the 1770s, by the 1820s it had swept through Europe....

Beginning in the last decades of the 18th century, it transformed poetry, the novel, drama, painting, sculpture, all forms of concert music (especially opera), and ballet

This last shift was the result of the triumph of the class which invented, fostered, and adopted as its own the romantic movement: the bourgeoisie..

the most popular orchestral music in the world is that of the romantic era.... When John Williams created the sound of the future in Star Wars, it was the sound of 19th-century Romanticism--still the most popular style for epic film soundtracks

Folklore and Popular Art

the belief that products of the uncultivated popular imagination could equal or even surpass those of the educated court poets and composers who had previously monopolized the attentions of scholars and connoisseurs. –

Whereas during much of the 17th and 18th centuries learned allusions, complexity and grandiosity were prized, the new romantic taste favored simplicity and naturalness;... . Rather than paying attention to the individual authors of popular works, these scholars celebrated the anonymous masses who invented and transmuted these works as if from their very souls.

Nationalism

The natural consequence of dwelling on creative folk genius was a good deal of nationalism... Goethe deliberately places German folkloric themes and images on a par with Classical ones in Faust.

Shakespeare

But one of the early effects of this interest in the folk arts seems particularly strange to us moderns: the rise and spread of the reputation of William Shakespeare. Although he is regarded today as the epitome of the great writer, his reputation was at first very different

Shakespeare's plays did all... with no attention paid to the academic rules

If the English romantics exalted Shakespeare's works as the greatest of their classics, his effect on the Germans was positively explosive

His disregard for the classical rules which they found so confining inspired them. Writers like Friedrich von Schiller and Goethe created their own dramas inspired by Shakespeare. Faust contains many Shakespearian allusions as well as imitating all of the nonclassical qualities enumerated above.

How Shakespear influenced romantics:

To the Romantics, however, he was the essence of folk poetry, the ultimate vindication of their faith in spontaneous creativity. Much of the drama of the European 19th century is influenced by him, painters illustrated scenes from his plays, and composers based orchestral tone poems and operas on his narratives.

Rejecting the Enlightenment ideal of balance and rationalism, readers eagerly sought out the hysterical, mystical, passionate adventures of terrified heroes and heroines in the clutches of frightening, mysterious forces.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is often cited as a forerunner of modern science fiction.

other influential characteristic of the Gothic romance was its evocation of strong, irrational emotions--particularly horror. Whereas Voltaire and his comrades (from Enlightenment) had abhorred "enthusiasm" and strove to dispel the mists of superstition; the Gothic writers evoked all manner of irrational scenes designed to horrify and amaze.

In this they were inspired by certain currents contemporaneous with the Enlightenment, in particular the writings of Voltaire's arch-rival, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau

explored in his fiction the agonies of frustrated love

It was the romantics who first celebrated romantic love as the natural birthright of every human being, the most exalted of human sentiments, and the necessary foundation of a successful marriage. Whether or not one agrees that this change of attitude was a wise one, it must be admitted to have been one of the most influential in the history of the world.

this change of attitude was a wise one, it must be admitted to have been one of the most influential in the history of the world.

this conviction which continues to shape much of our thinking about relationships, marriage, and the family found its mature form during the Romantic age.

Exoticism

Another important aspect of Romanticism is the exotic

Romantic age was also a period in which Europeans traveled more than ever to examine at first hand the far-off lands of which they had read.

Many male travelers viewed the women of almost any foreign land one could name as more sexually desirable and available than the women at home, and so they are depicted in fiction, drama, art, and opera.

exoticism in literature was inspired more by Lord Byron

Religion

the transformation of religion far removed from traditional religious art.

during the Romantic era many artists were drawn to religious imagery

Religion was estheticized, and writers felt free to draw on Biblical themes with the same freedom as their predecessors had drawn on classical mythology,

For all that many of its features were reactions against the rationalist Enlightenment, Romanticism also incorporated much from the earlier movement, or coexisted with the changes it had brought about.

Individualism

(the social background)

One of the most important developments of this period is the rise in the importance of individualism. Before the 18th Century, few Europeans concerned themselves with discovering their own individual identities. They were what they had been born: nobles, peasants, or merchants. As mercantalism and capitalism gradually transformed Europe, however, it destablized the old patterns. The new industrialists naturally liked to credit themselves for having built their large fortunes and rejected the right of society to regulate and tax their enterprises. they developed their own tastes in the arts and created new social and artistic movements alien to the old aristocracy.

The changing economy made individualism attractive

It was in the Romantic period--not coincidentally also the period of the industrial revolution--that such concern with individualism became much more widespread.

But the most influential exemplar of individualism for the 19th century was not a creative artist at all, but a military man: Napoleon Bonaparte. The dramatic way in which he rose to the head of France in the chaotic wake of its bloody revolution, led his army to a series of triumphs in Europe to build a brief but influential Empire, and created new styles, tastes, and even laws with disregard for public opinion fascinated the people of the time. saw in him the ultimate corrosive force which celebrated individual striving and freedom at the expense of responsibility and tradition.

We call the reckless character who seeks to remold the world to his own desires with little regard for morality or tradition "Faustian," after Goethe's character, but he might as well be called "Napoleonic."

Ideas of romanticism:

The modern fascination with self-definition and self-invention, the notion that adolescence is naturally a time of rebellion in which one "finds oneself," the idea that the best path to faith is through individual choice, the idea that government exists to serve the individuals who have created it: all of these are products of the romantic celebration of the individual at the expense of society and tradition.

Romanticism was successfu in changing the definition of what it means to be human.

SOURCE:

ttp://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/romanticism.html

rejection of traditional boundaries and categories was a hallmark of the Romantic mindset.)

The spirit of rebelliousness was expressed in the name of modernity, the thirst for which had originated in the Enlightenment but gathered in intensity during the Romantic era

‘It takes courage to be romantic, because you must take risks’ (Brookner, 1971, p.48).

Brookner, A. (1971) The Genius of the Future, London and New York, Phaidon.

Victor Hugo – acknowledged leader of the romantics

the 1827 Preface to Cromwell by the writer and critic Victor Hugo, an acknowledged leader of the Romantics, is a manifesto accompanying a drama he had written. It is a call to arms to fellow Romantics to cast aside the old ways and embrace a Romantic credo. The main thrust of the Preface is blatantly anti-classical: Hugo demands that writers should no longer work under the tyranny of classical rules or genres. Arguing that there must be a new spirit of liberty in art, he declares, ‘There are no rules; there are no models! Or rather there are no rules except the general rules of nature’ (Hugo, 1949, p.41). While he acknowledges that writers must proceed in a way compatible with their chosen subject, Hugo also denounces the servile imitation of any source

The book in which he was cited:

Hugo, V. (1949) Préface de Cromwell suivie d’extraits d’autres préfaces dramatiques, Paris, Librairie Larousse (first published 1827).

How enlightenment unlocked romanticism :

In a typical switch from an enlightened to a Romantic perspective, the psychological and social ideas opened up by the Enlightenment’s consideration of such places gave way to the application of those ideas to a process of artistic self-exploration and self-expression.

central to Romanticism was the idea that the artist dealt essentially with the inexplicit, with the suggested rather than with the clearly expressed

The view that the world is essentially an ‘impenetrable veil’ rather than a composite of knowable, classifiable and understandable phenomena represents a key shift from Enlightenment to Romantic thinking

3 comments:

Bluejetdude said...

DAMN Jolanta, thats alot of work and research. plenty to put into the presentation. I'll post my findings tonight.

Aj said...

Amazing, love the amount of research, will post my stuff as soon i get the rights to post, it still says i cant post :(

Ruben Martins said...

really ? weird

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