Romanticisms, Histories, and Romantic Cultures

College Literature, Summer 2003 by Najarian, James

Romanticisms, Histories, and Romantic Cultures

Connell, Philip. 2001. Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. $60.00 hc. 352 pp.

Hofstetter, Michael J. 2001. The Romantic Idea of a University: England and Germany, 1770-1850. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave. $58.00 hc. 178 pp.

Morton, Timothy. 2000. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $60.00 hc. 300 pp.

Plotz, Judith. 2001. Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. $49.95 hc. 320 pp.

When I started graduate school, the first day of our class on Romanticism studied the old debate between Rene Wellek's assertion that Romanticism was a cohesive phenomenon and A.O. Lovejoy's claim that it was a fragmented one. Lovejoy wrote of Romanticisms, plural. As late as 1989, this was a debate Wellek was assumed to have won. Of course the scene is very different now, as the term is once again under scrutiny. Some critics have followed Jerome McGann's lead and substituted "Romantic Period" as an adjective for late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century writings, making "Romanticism" an historical rather than an aesthetic or philosophical category. Although McGann pointed out that many Romantic-era writers did not subscribe to Romantic ideals, "Romantic period" can add an historicist sheen to the older idea of a Romantic belief-system. And in new historicist criticism, Romantic writing is often presumed to have a unitary approach, though this is a radical political one rather than an ethical, philosophical, or spiritual one. "Romanticism" is still under scrutiny in a way no other periodization is (the October 2001 issue of PMLA contains an impassioned discussion of the term.) Each of the works under review has the word "Romantic" or "Romanticism" in its title and is caught up in the ongoing discussion about the extent to which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cultural productions hang together.

Michael J. Hofstetter adheres to Wellek's notion of Romanticism as a powerful, united philosophical stance. He identifies a Romantic position on higher education, which he labels the "romantic Idea of the university." His posture is fundamentally humanist; he argues that this Romantic Idea of the university replaced the confessional or religious idea of the university, much as Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley displaced theological beliefs in favor of individual vision. "Romantic" still has a meaning for him that is not merely chronological. With some bows to Wellek and Otto Bollnow, Hofstetter aims to contrast the English and German manifestations of Romanticism in university reform.

The confessional aim of the university was central to its invention in the medieval era and its reinvigoration during the Reformation. Hofstetter traces the decline of both German and English universities in the eighteenth century to the pressures of secular life: "What was wrong was that the old, confessional Idea of a university had ceased to function, but a new Idea had yet to replace it" (2001, 20). In Germany, universities became training grounds for court officials. In England, Oxford and Cambridge grew to be combined seminary-finishing schools: the statutes and requirements for a degree fell into disuse. (This was not the case in Scotland, where the University of Edinburgh was reformed and secularized on the Dutch model.) Eighteenth-century English intellectuals denigrated the effects of the universities on real education. As Gibbon wrote, "To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me as a son as I am willing to disclaim her as a mother" (qtd. in Hofstetter 11).

Hofstetter's most extensive chapter examines university reform in Germany in the eighteenth century, starting with scholar-teachers from the mid-century like Immanuel Kant at Konigsberg. Kant placed philosophy at the center of an education in Vernunft, or Reason. The narrative of the practical attempts to reform German universities is indeed interesting; first Friedrich Schiller and then Johann Fichte attempted to change the University of Jena into an institution that emphasized self-cultivation. Fichte eventually took on the entire university culture, including the student fraternities, and attracted luminaries like the Schlegel brothers, as well as Schelling, and Hoderlin. But his tactics eventually forced his resignation in 1799, and the University of Jena languished.

Napoleon defeated Prussia (coincidentally at Jena) in 1806 and seized its territories west of the Elbe, including most of its universities. This provided the material impetus to continue the reforms that had been nipped in the bud at Jena. The Prussian government sought to rebuild education in the truncated state, and it sought suggestions for this new institution from Fichte and Schleiermacher. Fichte proposed starting completely anew: this, he argued, would provide the German nation with a new moral regeneration. Schleiermacher presented a more limited plan that would preserve most of the old institutions and their customs. Eventually, Alexander von Humboldt put together a plan that owed something to Fichte's national idealism and to Schleiermacher's sense of practical limitations. The King provided substantial funds and hired both men for a new, philosophical university at Berlin.