Humanity

In Humanities, we have been learning about how the early modern world found meaning in different expressions of structure and order: for example, the idea of decorum in Phaedra, the systematizing of the physical world in Baroque art, the Doctrine of the Affections in music. The search for meaning in structure continues into the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason with its emphasis on the values of balance, symmetry, and rationality.

In the Romantic period that followed, however, aesthetic values in western Europe began to change when writers, musicians, and artists turned to emotion, intuition, and other less rational ways of knowing to understand and express the world and human experience.

For this assignment, choose one work each of music, art, and literature from the Romantic period and contrast them with one work each of music, art, and literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Use specific detail to describe and analyze those works in terms of the way the aesthetic paradigm changed from Classicism/Neoclassicism to Romanticism. Be sure that you explain what meaning and value were attached to matters of form as well as content.

Your essay should:

• include a thesis which incorporates the course theme of “Change and Tradition”
• use an abundance of specific detail to substantiate your assertions, using direct quotation from your texts when relevant
• include a conclusion in which you use your analysis to finally state something substantive about the way Romantic aesthetics differ from Classical or Baroque
• include a separate title page (which is not page 1) with an imaginative title

 

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