IGS 530J (3)
Studies in Intellectual Histories. Romanticism and the War on Terror
Instructor: Dr. George Grinnell
Course Description:
The modern concept of Terror can be dated to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror in postrevolutionary France in the 1790s. Examining the intellectual and cultural roots of the discourses surrounding our contemporary War on Terror in the Romantic-era, this course will focus particularly upon how terror begins as an expression of the state’s monopoly on the use of force exercised against its own population and then shifts into what we now think of as a nonstate exercise of violence against a population. The course will examine how both of these understandings of terrorism are mediated by cultural considerations of nation, identity, the Orient, biometrics, and will chart how the threat of terrorism, particularly for the British, consolidated a sense of homeland security in the idea of a nation poised to defend itself against the threat of revolutionary violence in France.Probing what terror and terrorism means and the social construction of discourses that shape how this all too meaningful label is applied, we will proceed by considering recent critical works and then turn to Romantic-era texts that address events or ideas associated with what is now called the War on Terror. These primary readings will be supplemented by critical readings that will help to frame particular topics.
How does the Romantic period understand and represent terror, and does it provide interpretations that resist the violent logic of retribution associated with discourses of terror today? In addition to this guiding interpretative query, this course will probe a number of other related concerns. In what ways do discussions of terror engage questions of human rights and to what ends? To what extent is terror a rhetorical construction and what would it mean to think
of it as such? Does the Romantic-era have a concept of suicide bombing even if it did not name it as such? How does the Romantic-era’s feminization of the East and its spectacularization of veiled Muslim women support and sustain Western perceptions of Muslim and Arab individuals and nations today? Can earlier forms of biometric identification tell us something about the ideological assumptions and application of embodied forms of cross-border identification? What does it mean to make a spectacle of tortured bodies? In what ways, moreover, does the Romantic period’s refinement of the Gothic novel speak to the individual experience of being subject to terror? What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and terror? By constructing a genealogy of terror in the Romantic period, the course will put these and other questions into play, with a goal of developing an understanding of contemporary discourses of terror and consider the possibility of re-activating forms of critical dissent that may have been lost or overlooked in our own time.
Method of Assessment
Participation: 10%
Seminar: 25%
Annotated Bibliography 5%
Seminar Critique 15%
Essay Proposal 5%
Essay 40%
Required Texts:
Online archive of primary readings
Coursepack (secondary materials)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Description of Assignments
Seminars:
Members of the class will individually deliver an approximately 45 minute seminar on one of the assigned primary text readings as scheduled below. Your task here is to teach this material to the class by incorporating relevant critical information and an original critical perspective on the text that addresses concerns related to discourses of Terror in the Romantic period.
Annotated Bibliography:
To be submitted prior to beginning your presentation, this assignment requires you to annotate 8-10 sources you consulted and which assisted the development of your seminar. The assignment should be 1500-2000 words.
Seminar Critique:
You will also be required to complete a seminar evaluation which takes the form of a critical response to one seminar delivered by a colleague in the class. This critical response will be submitted via email to both the instructor and the seminar presenter simultaneously and should be approximately 1000 words in length.
Essay:
The final essay should be between approximately 25 pages in length and requires a 500-word proposal to be submitted in week 10. The proposal will receive comments from peers and from the instructor. The essay may focus on texts from the course or other Romantic-era texts. If you wish to compose a paper on questions of Terror not immediately related to the Romantic period—and this is certainly a possibility—I ask that you please consult with me first.
Schedule of Readings
Framing Terror
Week One Introductions
Week Two Marc Redfield, “What is in a Name-Date?
Reflections on 9/11"
Gayatri Spivak, “Terror: A Speech After
9/11”
Judith Butler, from Precarious Life
Week Three Slavoj Zizek, ed., Robespierre: Virtue
and Terror [a collection of speeches by
Robespierre]
Giorgio Agamben, from State of
Exception
Homeland (In)Security
Week Four Elizabeth Inchbald, “The Massacre”
Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual
Peace”
Week Five Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the
Revolution in France
Helen Maria Williams, from Letters from France
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity”
The Psychology of Terror
Week Six Tales of Terror(1801)John Keats, “The Terror of Death”
Richard Devetak, “The Gothic Scene of
International Relations: Ghosts,
Monsters, Terror and the Sublime
after September 11”
Week Seven Percy Shelley, St. Irvyne
Foucault, from The Birth of Biopolitics
Week Eight Percy Shelley,“The Mask of Anarchy,”
“Song to the Men of England,”
“England in 1819,” “On the Medusa of
Leonardo Da Vinci” Achille Mbembe,
“Necropolitics”
Visual Culture and Biometrics
Week Nine The Pocket Lavater
William Blake, “London”; and images
from Essays on Physiognomy and
Narrative of Five Years Expedition
against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
Images from Abu Ghraib
Henry Giroux, from Beyond the Spectacle
of Terrorism
Week Ten Elizabeth Craven, A Journey through the
Crimea to Constantinople
Jasbir Puar, from Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times
Week Eleven Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Cathy Davidson, “Olaudah Equiano,
Written by Himself”
Week Twelve A View of London, or, The Stranger's
Guide Through the British Metropolis (1804)
The Stranger’s Guide, or the Frauds of London
Exposed (1810)
Peter Melville, “The Rights of the
Stranger: Kant’s ‘Bonds of Hospitality’”
The Afterlives of Terror
Week Thirteen William Wordsworth, from The
Prelude
David Simpson, “Theory in the Time
of Death”
Homi Bhabha, “Terror and After”
Last reviewed 
7/21/2009 1:12:16 PM
