Undergraduate

From Enlightenment to Romanticism c.1780-1830

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• Summary
• Course content
• Entry
• Qualifications
• If you have a disability or additional requirement
• Course materials
• Teaching and assessment
• Students also studied
• Future availability
• How to register

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Summary

This interdisciplinary course is designed to enhance and clarify your critical understanding of this crucially formative period in modern European history. At its heart is a range of European texts associated with the epoch-making transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. The texts include music, philosophical and scientific writings, historical documents, poetry, paintings and architecture by figures as diverse as Mozart, Rousseau, Davy, Byron, Goethe, Schubert and Delacroix – and topics as varied as Napoleon, the French Revolution, religious revival, African exploration and slavery, the Lake District, New Lanark, the Soane Museum and Brighton Pavilion.

Course content

This course develops your knowledge and skills across seven arts disciplines, building on those introduced at Level 1 and preparing for further interdisciplinary or discipline-based study at Level 3. You will study some of the great works of European art, music and literature, and other original and thought-provoking works produced across a period which marks the advent of the modern world. All of these works are placed clearly within their historical context.

From around 1780, as your texts will show, the mainstream European Enlightenment, with its emphasis on empiricism, scientific observation and neoclassicism in art and literature, gave way to a dawning Romanticism, driven by very different impulses. Romantic sympathies included a far greater receptiveness to emotion, imagination and nature; the cult of the individual, especially the artist, the `genius’ and the hero; the foreign and the exotic. But this revolutionary shift was not automatic or uniform, and, as you will discover, many of your texts reflect aspects of both Romanticism and Enlightenment.

To assist your study there are 32 units of published teaching material, supplemented by DVDs, audio CDs and two CD-ROMs. (Use of the CD-ROMs is strongly encouraged. However, their use is not compulsory: alternative materials are provided and course assignments will be set in such a way that they will be equally accessible to students not using the CD-ROMs.) The purpose of the teaching material is to assist your learning, to set the texts in context, and open up, comment on and explore them in depth, with exercises designed to help you engage actively with the texts: in short, to develop your understanding and enjoyment of them.

The units are divided into seven blocks, corresponding to seven basic themes:

Block 1, Death of the Old Regime?, is preceded by a Course Introduction which outlines and illustrates the characteristics of the Enlightenment c.1740–80 and explores how it led into Romanticism. Your first texts consist of works rooted in the Enlightenment which appear to challenge the social and religious status quo and perhaps the Enlightenment itself: Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and writings on religion and morals by Hume, Rousseau and Sade. Unit 6 introduces you to the main facts and broad implications of the French Revolution, the crucial historical watershed of the period.

Block 2, The Napoleonic Phenomenon, will critically consider, through his biography by Stendhal and other contemporary documents, Napoleon as Europe’s indisputable dominating figure in the period, a moderniser rooted in the Enlightenment mindset yet a charismatic hero and icon of Romanticism. The block then explores the different ways in which artists such as Gros and David depicted Napoleon’s elusive and changing, but always dramatic, public persona.

Block 3, Religion, Exploration and Slavery, offers examples of verse and prose reflecting the religious revival in England by John Newton, William Cowper and William Wilberforce, prime movers in the spread of evangelicalism as well as in the campaign to abolish slavery. The focus then shifts to a classic text of exploration, Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, followed by writings by victims of the slave trade, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Robert Wedderburn and Mary Prince.

Block 4, Industry and Changing Landscapes, will consider the growing attraction of the Lake District through the writings of Thomas West, William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, William Wordsworth, and the paintings of Constable and Turner. You will examine notions of the sublime and the picturesque theorised by Burke and others and the appropriation of these notions by a burgeoning tourist industry. The tension between idealised, tourist representations and more pragmatic attitudes will be explored in the units on the model community established at New Lanark in Scotland by the social reformer and industrialist Robert Owen, and his progressive ideas on working conditions in A New View of Society.

Block 5, Davy and Soane: New Approaches to Science and Architecture, examines the social and political context of science through the work of Humphry Davy and the writings of Mrs Marcet which greatly popularised scientific experimentation. You will then go on to study the eclectic architect John Soane, by exploring his extraordinary treasure-house of art and sculpture, now the Soane Museum, London. Two associated CD-ROMs provide an innovative way of studying some of the material associated with Davy and Soane.

Block 6, New Conceptions of Art and the Artist, 'contains the conceptual heart of the course'. Here you will study the fundamental shift in the conception of aesthetic experience expressed in some key German texts. You will then encounter three acknowledged masterpieces of the period: Goethe’s classic verse-drama Faust Part One, a selection of Schubert’s songs in the form of musical settings of poems by Goethe; and Byron’s narrative poem Childe Harold, Canto III.

Block 7, The Exotic and the Oriental, will focus on the exotic and oriental aspects of Romanticism through study of the Regency pleasure-palace, Brighton Pavilion, and related texts, and the art of Delacroix. The block ends with a Course Conclusion, designed to help your revision and to prompt some overall thoughts about the shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism.

The course will enable you to develop your knowledge and skills across most of the disciplines studied in the Arts Faculty: the texts include poems, historical documents, paintings, two remarkable buildings, a verse drama, an opera and much else.

For further information on this course visit the A207 website. 

Entry

You are not formally required to have taken any other OU courses before this one. Nevertheless, it is a Level 2 course and builds on the Level 1 course The arts past and present (AA100). These Level 1 courses develop study skills such as logical thinking, clear expression, essay writing and the ability to select and interpret relevant material. They also offer an introduction to interdisciplinary work, incorporating all eight disciplines taught in the Arts Faculty. If you have not studied either of these courses or an equivalent course at Level 1 you may struggle with parts of A207. Your regional or national centre will be able to tell you where you can see reference copies of AA100, or you can buy selected materials from Open University Worldwide Ltd.

If you have any doubt about the suitability of the course, please contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service.

Preparatory work

You may like to consult one or more of the following books. An easy popular introduction to the subject is Duncan Heath and Judy Boreham, Introducing Romanticism, Icon Books, 2005. Norman Hampson, The First European Revolution, 1776-1815, Thames & Hudson, 1969 (1979 reprint) is a general historical survey with some attention to culture. Franklin L. Ford, Europe 1780–1830, Longman, 1989 and Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–184, Abacus, 1988 are history textbooks which include some coverage of cultural trends. William Vaughan, Romanticism and Art, Thames & Hudson, 1978, provides clear coverage of the subject with lavish illustrations. Other recommended books are Hugh Honour, Romanticism, Penguin, 1991, and Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Oxford, 1981. A DVD of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is provided with your course material. Stendhal's A Life of Napoleon will also be provided with your course material (see below), but is available at £16.99 in an edition published by the Davenant Press in October 2003, PO Box 323, Burford, Oxon OX18 4XN, with whom orders may be placed (Fax 01993 824129, email Judith@history.u-net.com). (Once you have decided to take this course, you may well want to acquire the set books as soon as possible. Please note, however, that if you do purchase items also supplied free of charge as part of the course material or at a discount through Eddington Hook, no exchange or refund is offered for a copy which you may have purchased independently.)

Qualifications

A207 is an optional course in our

• BA (Honours) Humanities (B03)
• BA (Honours) Literature (B02)
• BA (Honours) History (B01)
• BA/BSc (Honours) European Studies (B10)
• BA (Honours) Modern Language Studies (B30)

It can also count towards most of our other degrees at bachelors level, where it is suitable for a BA. We advise you to refer to the relevant qualification descriptions for information on the circumstances in which this course can count towards these qualifications because from time to time the structure and requirements may change.

If you have a disability or additional requirement

Written transcripts are available for the audio-visual material. The written course material is available in comb-bound format. Our Services for disabled students website has the latest information about availability.

If you are a new student, or new to courses using a computer or the internet, you will need to inform us of your particular needs as soon as possible, as some of our support services may take several weeks to arrange. Details of how to do this and our range of support services are described in our booklet Meeting Your Needs which you can download or request from our Student Registration & Enquiry Service.

You can also find information about accessible course materials, financial support and the Disabled Students' Allowance, equipment and other services, on our Services for disabled students website. It also includes our contact details for advice and support both before you register and while you are studying.

Course materials

What's included

Course books (seven books of course units); Stendhal, A Life of Napoleon, translated by Roland Gant, edited by A. Lentin; other printed materials; DVDs (including a full production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni), audio CDs, two CD-ROMs.

You will need

You will need a television; DVD player; audio CD player.

Computing requirements

This course includes online computer activities – you can access these using a web browser that can play Flash and Shockwave. Some of your course software will be provided on disk.

You will need internet access and a computer. If you have purchased a new Windows computer since 2002 it should meet your course computing requirements. Check our Technical Requirements section if your computer is older than this or is otherwise unusual. Please note that you cannot use an Apple Mac or Linux computer unless it is running windows Boot Camp or similar.

Teaching and assessment

Support from your tutor

You will have a tutor who will help you with the course material and mark and comment on your written work, and whom you can ask for advice and guidance. We may also be able to offer group tutorials or day schools that you are encouraged, but not obliged, to attend. Where your tutorials are held will depend on the distribution of students taking the course.

Contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service if you want to know more about study with The Open University before you register.

Assessment

The assessment details for this course can be found in the facts box above.

You can choose whether to submit your tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) on paper or online through the eTMA system. You may want to use the eTMA system for some of your assignments but submit on paper for others. This is entirely your choice.

Assessment is an essential part of the teaching, so you are expected to complete it all. But if you unavoidably miss or do badly in an assignment, this course allows you a ‘substitution score’. In A207 this rule can apply to one assignment only from TMAs 01-05. TMA 06 is non-substitutable. You will be given more detailed information when you begin the course.

Students also studied

Students who studied this course also studied at some time:

• Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900 (A200)
• Approaching literature (A210)
• The arts past and present (AA100)
• Art and its histories (A216)

Future availability

The details given here are for the course that starts in October 2010. We expect it to be available once a year.

How to register

To register a place on this course return to the top of the page and use the Click to register button. For more information and advice about registration see OU Study Explained.

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An undergraduate course in Arts and Humanities.

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