Our discussions will be governed by Denise Gigante's theories of gustatory pleasures and supported by readings on the sublime, picturesque, and beautiful early in the semester -- in turn, leading us into the establishment of physical gustatory pleasures of taste in contrast against artistic definitions of literary taste. After an initial meeting in which we crowd-sourced what the students want to read, the schedule came together with primarily non-fiction essays and Shelley's Frankenstein as the pinnacle of our travel rewards. (Though some requested lots of Blake, some Charlotte Smith sonnet sequences, I couldn't quite get them to fit into our theme.) Our final days will be spent reading actual gourmands who were writing during the Romantic period -- most definitely authors outside our canonical Big 6.

The initial description and title for this graduate course were crowd-sourced via my Twitter community, made up of Romanticists and Digital Humanists, as well as the grand community of former NEH participants in Summer 2010.  As the semester moves along, I will regularly post to Teaching Romanticism: A Romantic Circles Pedagogy Blog, since that community was also helpful in crafting this course.

Since Digital Humanities and interesting digital projects are part of my work, I queried the students about introducing a mapping project similar to the project described in Erin Sells� article on ProfHack/Chronicle of Higher Education about �Mapping Novels with GoogleEarth.� I couldn't obtain adequate computer lab time to create a mapping project for our class, but I left a single day open to see if we could make it happen. That project will collaborative and class-driving; I'm not even sure it will be graded. This is another area that I'd like to leave open to the course participants to discuss/decide. In any event, the mapping project (say of The Grand Tour by Mary Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, or the Shelleys) would be really incredible to visualize. Also, these are teachers and teachers-in-training. Giving them permission to be creative and then providing them with the skills to take these kinds of projects to their students is the real-world kind of skills that I believe our program should be offering our students.