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He shifts from the instinctual world of the emotions to a cerebral existence, and loses a sense of what is truly meaningful in life. In Romantic thinking, which also idealized a pastoral, earthy lifestyle, being separated from the world of the emotions was seen as negative. Rousseau describes his feelings for books as a child as a kind of romance, and he felt equally as intensely about Ovid's Metamorphosis and the characters in Moliere's plays as he did about aspects of his real existence. But his imitation of Greeks and Romans, which some people might admire as precocious, Rousseau sees as false, much like the false dogmatism of many Catholics, which he chronicles in Book 2, regarding his theological education. Anything that takes a person away from nature was negative, according to the Romantics: Rousseau describes a rustic feast as better than fine Parisian fare, and sees the beauty and uncomplicated sexuality of peasant girls in Book 4 as just as lovely as that of sophisticated women.
Some religious and 'civilized'...
Gaime, are seen as positive, as they enforce a kind of moderation in Rousseau's view of himself -- Rousseau says he tended to see things, including his own abilities, in extremes, and the abbe counseled him to look the world and his own character in a more realistic fashion. The abbe also imposed upon Rousseau a sense of practicality, which Rousseau valued -- Rousseau viewed hands-on and technical arts as just as important and valuable, if not more so, than theory. This is also keeping with the Romantic idea that truth is more important than artifice and complexity in civilization. In the Confessions, Rousseau's philosophical and political ideas about what makes a 'natural man' and a good education are shown to be taking shape, as he crafts the narrative of his youth to conform his ideas about the importance of good health, the open air, and putting books and abstract ideas of religion, philosophy, and the classical world in their appropriate (secondary) place to real life.
British Lit. Romanticism to Present Following the liberating Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the age when humanity was triumphing through literature and Rousseau's philosophy was inspiring revolutions, the age of Romanticism saw the birth of some genius writers of its own. Among them, Lord Byron, a man who lived his thirty-six years with the intensity of one who wants to know it all and do it all, was a prolific writer
Keats attempted to purify the sublimity in nature -- but it was disconnected from the old world view of sublimity in nature with regard to God. Keats' Romanticism often employed the use of the gods and heroes of antiquity -- what it moved away from (and rightly so) was the Protestant ethos that had corrupted the Western religious sensibility. For Keats, recapturing the sublimity of the ancients was part
British and German Romanticism: Revolutionary art, counterrevolutionary politics The Romantic Movement has become part of our cultural consciousness to such a degree that its assumptions regarding the centrality of the individual, its elegiac idealization of the pastoral, and its belief in human spirituality that could not be understood with pure rationality have become associated with the essence of art itself. While the birth of the Romantic movement is associated with the French
" This fire will not only die out, but will turn into the destructive flames of an obsession. Werther's descriptions of his deductions, feelings, contemplation fruits and observations are accompanied by various dialogues he has with some of the people he happened to meet in the country. Although in love and obviously preoccupied with Lotte a great deal of his time, he is also keen to go on making observations about
Ross (1988) notes the development of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and indicates that it was essentially a masculine phenomenon: Romantic poetizing is not just what women cannot do because they are not expected to; it is also what some men do in order to reconfirm their capacity to influence the world in ways socio-historically determined as masculine. The categories of gender, both in their lives and in their
" (7) Chomsky warns of ideological motivations of some scientific paradigms, just as with the aforementioned racial emphasis of early anthropology. Here, Russell espouses a Platonic episteme by enunciating the expectations of behavior between different classes. While Plato philosophized that persons are born with the characteristics fitting of their caste, Russell envisages a society in which "ordinary" men and women are expected to be collectivized and, therefore, devoid of individual expression. Jean