The romance of study abroad is then a set of dynamics that may form and inform ways in which students engage with their host environments.
Love at First Sight/Site
Romance is a ritual that seems oddly archaic in these more utilitarian times. It was a process through which (when I was a lad) we aspired to move from attraction to seduction: a set of gestures aimed at ultimate intimacy. Important artifacts such as flowers and music were employed as visual and audio aids. For an earlier generation, by way of example, the songs of Frank Sinatra proved to be somewhat effective. This was particularly true of the Capitol Record years, from 1953 to 1961, when liquid tones melted hearts with lyrics in which the pain of unrequited love was tragically interesting and irresistibly attractive (or so we hoped). In this context a romantic is the sort of person for whom moon in June are logical collocations. They also keep florists in business.
This form of romance may, ostensibly, have tenuous connection with study abroad, but the process of attraction, romance, and seduction (with the co-related potential for rejection and abandonment) resonates metaphorically with the student experience in a number of ways. Martha Johnson argues that, in predeparture phases, student expectations parallel romantic expectations: “The anticipation and preparation are analogous to a long awaited first date, and in many cases a ‘blind date’ by the time the student departs” (2012: 33).
Study abroad is, at some level, an engagement with a dreamed landscape populated by iconic images: projections that are formed by a combination of curiosity, imagination, and passion, as Martha Johnson indicates: “the ability of the city to elicit a visceral and emotional response is a powerful but often also untapped element of the experience abroad” (2012: 32).
As in any relationship, the early days of engagement are marked by euphoria, unease, excitement, embarrassment, and all the cluster of feelings that frequently characterize rituals of romantic engagement. At some point the student may discover that they love Paris or hate Berlin, adore London but are oddly indifferent to Rome. The language of romance is embedded in the ways in which we relate to the discovery of place.
The Exalted Mood
The romantic is not, of course, solely about the curious business of falling in and out of love, in what the Greeks called “Eros.” As Wordsworth demonstrates in “The Prelude” (1799–1805), something closer to spiritual love, or “Agape,” is expressed through the exalted mood; encounters with ideas and landscape marked by heightened intensity:
This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist
Without Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
Wordsworth engaged with natural and built environments (a field of daffodils and Westminster Bridge) with the kind of intensity that transformed the external world into internal epiphany. Place is more than geography and history; it has the power to transform consciousness. Tim Blanning argues that in the Romantic imagination, “the inner self was everything: if the light did not shine brightly from within, nothing worthwhile could be achieved” (2010: 31).
The Romantics embedded movement in their philosophy both in a literal sense (engagement with place acts as a catalyst for heightened perception), and metaphorically in that an objective was to move from one level of consciousness to another higher form of intensity.2 At the center of our endeavor is the notion of disturbance as an educational aspiration. The heart of the liberal educational ideal is the aspiration to create experiences that broaden, challenge, and disrupt students’ assumptions. In a domestic context, the challenge of new ideas can achieve that purpose. In study abroad the process of disturbance is both physical and intellectual; opportunities to broaden and deepen student thought are enhanced by simultaneous engagement with the unfamiliar in both ideas and locations.
The paradox through which exposure to new external environments may enlighten and enrich the inner self was well understood by the Romantic poets, as demonstrated by Shelley in “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”:
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind . . .
The interplay of mind and space reflects, in rhetorical and idealized form, the kind of creative engagement that is aspirational for study abroad students.
The Romantics were essentially cosmopolitan in that they sought to expand their consciousness beyond the parochial. In a literal sense, many of them traveled widely and recognized that new locations (particularly the Hellenic and Mediterranean worlds) offered radical ways of understanding place as the interaction of sensibility, history, geography, and myth. Perception is redefined and transformed in the process. The redefinition of perception is a core value in study abroad.
A Hopeless Romantic
A far less desirable outcome is signaled by the idea of romance as a delusion and a form of distorted myopia. In this sense, a romantic view may endorse stereotypical constructs. By way of illustration, European locations are frequently presented through unchallenged assumptions about “authenticity.” Those usually derive from romantic nostalgia for lost identities that were, in any case, mostly illusory.
The idea of authenticity derives from an idea of what constitutes the “real” Spain or Italy, or wherever. These notions are usually rooted in idealized images: Jerusalems of the imagination. Lamentations about the loss of the real England, for example, customarily derive from a version of a dreamed landscape shaped by Ealing comedies or films starring Hugh Grant, conservative (and Conservative) delusions about the good old days, and countless fantasies of pastoral community. They are, for the most part, based on romanticized images untouched and untarnished by time, or by current reality.
The notion of the real Spain is filtered through imperfect recollections of Hemingway’s heroic landscapes, populated by noble and silent men, and mysterious dark-haired, temperamental women of outstanding, if menacing, beauty; but are the beaches of Benidorm really less authentic, less real, than the sawdust bars of Pamplona? British tourists drinking lager in the pubs by Levantine Beach look very real. What would an unreal Spain look like? Where is it? In short, notions of authenticity are usually expressions of romantic nostalgia for lost worlds that exist, if at all, in fictions, myths of nation and identity, thoughtless study abroad marketing, and, of course, tourist offices.
Study abroad is littered with romantic versions of national identity filtered through some combination of stereotype, manufactured tradition, iconic images, advertising, commerce, and myth. In reality the true Spaniard is as likely to be an accountant as a bullfighter and there are, anecdotally, more accountants than bullfighters in Madrid.
Conclusion: This Is a Fine Romance
It is apparent that there are many ways in which consideration of romance resonates with the endeavor of study abroad. It may offer a metaphor for understanding student engagement with new spaces; in the Romantic imagination, it represents a form of enriched and heightened sensibility that could profitably disturb and disrupt students’ preconceptions; in an alternative sense, it should teach