John Paulin, Ph.D.                                                                U.C.Berkeley Comparative  Literature

Is there ever a community that is not an imagined community? Must the suspension of disbelief be a surrender to superstition? The explicitly mythopoetic, fantastic productions of the Gothic imagination test the limits of what today we call virtual reality. Might we say that the Romantic employment of fantastic material from world mythology, folktales, folklore and superstition is a project of cultural production that seeks to establish a "Virtual Modernity" that is not simply a willful mystification or defiance of the Enlightenment? In this seminar we will examine how Romantic domains of verisimilitude and constructions of fantasy and utopia, constitute a certain awareness of and engagement with the "positive reality" of Enlightenment moral and epistemological visions and not simply their rejection. To consider these questions we shall first situate Romantic discourse relative to its backgrounds in Greek antiquity and the Eighteenth Century with readings of certain representative Classical and Enlightenment texts: the mythopoetic confabulations of Sappho and Plato and selections from Kant and others. From this point of departure, we will consider the Romantic syntheses of these diverse epistemologies and follow the legacy of Romanticism into contemporary society and popular culture.

How, paradoxically, do the Romantics, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys and others, combine: the passions that we associate with the imaginal world of Greek tragedy and with the altered states of lyric poetry; with the systematic division of mind and knowledge according to categories and disciplines that we associate with the Enlightenment? For all their cultivation of the imaginal, the Romantics are very much in the camp of the Enlightenment understandings of morality, politics and progress. Can we understand the Romantics' cultivation of the aesthetic as a medium that permits the synthesis of these apparently contrary sensibilities of image and concept, myth making and Enlightenment reason? Here I would like to consider Romanticism as the generation of discourses that are better able than the merely positive sensibility of Enlightenment rationalism to comprehend and elicit the power of the imagination in the realm of ideas as well as the role of the irrational in the more indeterminate rationalities of community relatedness. In this course we will consider the manner in which the productions of aesthetics and mythology can be invoked in the construction of shared sensibilities and interpretations of the real that we might call "virtual realities" --outlooks on life that challenge the need of "positive realities" to contain the possibilities of experience and relationship determinately within the bounds of systems that constitute the subjective givens of affect, sensation and apprehension merely as the objects of a knowledge that is finally and simply doctrinal. Do merely positive assertions of values violate fantasy and confound the subject in even the legitimate autonomy of its desires?

And then, we might turn the tables on the Enlightenment. For instance, what is virtual about the Categorical Imperative, Kant's insistence that we should be able to regard the maxims upon which we act as if they were laws of nature? To what extent are we justified in finding this Enlightenment vision of morality an imitation of nature and, in this regard, a virtual reality? In fact, in the "Introduction" to his Critique of Judgment, Kant places the origins of natural science itself in an "as if". To secure experience for the rational expectations of a positive scientific nature, we must first suppose that its diverse phenomena were ordered "as if by an understanding, although not our own." At this point, I would bring in some my research on this subject of nature's own virtual reality that has gone into the book that I am currently writing for Stanford University Press, The Pathos of Reason: Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Derrida and the Tragic Imagination.

To establish the Romantics' syncretism, their omnivorous mixing of every mythology they encountered as well as their invocations of animism and the mythological outlook, we'll begin with Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and go from there back to consider the daimonism at work in the lyrics of Sappho and Plato's Symposium. We shall return to works by the major romantics and the works of minor figures like, Byron's physician, Polidori, and follow the Gothic strands set in motion in this age down through their subsequent incarnations in literature, film and popular culture. Our materials will include films such as Griffith's Birth of A Nation and Lucas' Star Wars as successive realizations of Ivanhoe, as well as ballads and urban legends. We will consider also how such discourses are propagated in contemporary popular media such as advertising, television, talk radio, the Internet and the World Wide Web. How for instance, does the UFO lore propagated over the Internet and talk radio resemble vampire lore of the early Nineteenth Century? What about Calvin Klein commercials? How do the conspiracy theories promulgated in the same media resemble the improbable plots of Gothic novels such as The Vampyre? What do we do with Joe Camel and similar predators? Are the contemporary realities of the contemporary electronic manifestations of such tales any more or less virtual than those of the last century?

Some Theoretical considerations

Throughout the semester, we will consider different approaches to the synthesis of the virtual and positive domains of the mythopoetic vision and that of our Enlightenment legacy. First of all, looking to Plato's Symposium, a dialogue translated by Shelley, we can find in its presentation of eros a force that is very similar to the power of reason that we see operating in both in the dialectic of Kant's First Critique and in the sublimity of his Critique of Judgment. In the case of sublimity, for example, the mind attempts to exhibit the ideas of Reason, fails, and, nevertheless, is left with an intimation of a supersensible destiny. Reason, for Kant, is a power of desire which, in the case of the sublime aesthetic, makes us lose, momentarily, the positive ordering of experience possible through the application of a concept of nature. For Plato, on the other hand, Eros is a god of desire who leads his devotees ultimately in the direction of the good, the true and the beautiful, and, not incidentally, towards the supersensible ideas of Plato's own version of reason. We can see that, for all Kant's categorical Aristotelian rigor, he is Platonist, at least in his assimilation of the true and the good to the sublime if not to the beautiful. Also, worth considering is how Kant, in the "Transcendental Dialectic" of the First Critique, posits virtual objects for the disciplines of cosmology, psychology and theology. The dialectic is a Kantian eros that must fly in the direction of the ideas of world, soul and God, but never beyond the bounds of the Enlightenment. Still, if, as Kant says, the dialectic is in its legitimate employment merely "regulative," its presentations of world, soul and God can only be virtual.

Other points to consider in this regard, is the manner in which Sappho, Plato and the Romantics use mythology. Here we might consider myth as a spontaneous sort of organization of moral and epistemological cosmoi: a medium in which the realities of virtue and the virtual combine. As such, it might constitute a community discourse, in which artists can articulate and contest ideological valences at issue in their communities. On the other hand, if domains of virtuality and virtue combine in this fashion, the composition of such discourses might be way in which communities are imagined and, subsequently, constituted in the performance or enactment of the values presented. Is Romanticism itself a self-conscious celebration of this possibility? In this regard, is its fascination with the exotic a dialectic maneuver by which it entertains the virtuality of the world of positive appearances as a venue for change? What can we say about Sappho and those she was writing for?

We might ask here, how the positions of virtuality and virtue proper to given ideological assertions are employed contest or interpret the positions of others. We will also consider the aesthetics of morality: to what extent is sublimity a "feeling good" which can be substituted for doing good, a form of "virtual virtuosity"? Is this the critique of the Enlightenment in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? For all the access it promises to the ineffable communion of the true and the good, might sublimity be a moral recreation for the subjects of particular ideologies, a recreation that requires no more than assent? What is the entertainment value of morality regarded as such? How, for instance, is it promulgated in popular culture as discourses of collectives such as nation and empire; and how as such do the Romantics contest or promote these discourses? Here we can follow the legacy of Ivanhoe down through Twain's Life on the Mississippi, (where Twain exposes it as a spurious addition to the antebellum social contract), to Griffith's Birth of a Nation, Lucas' Star Wars and beyond.