English 835.00
The Enlightenment and Modernity
Prof. David Richter
Spring 2003
Mondays 6:30 to 8:30 pm
The latter half of the Eighteenth Century was one of the great transitional
periods of modern times: an age of monumental intellectual and social
ferment. It saw the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the
opening decades of the Industrial Revolution. While conservative
belief-systems were collapsing (like that of the "great chain of Being"
dating from classical times), new systems that would underlie nineteenth-
and twentieth-century ideologies were being born. All the traditional
notions about God's relation to the created world, the individual's duty to
his rulers, the subordination of women to men, and the internal workings of
the perceiving and acting subject were being called into question.
Meanwhile social and political life was being changed by cultural forces
including the emergence of (1) a public sphere dependent on journalism and
other forms of print culture; (2) a modern market economy stressing exchange
value over use value; (3) progressive forms of religious and quasi-religious
belief, including freemasonry and Methodism; (4) a growing attachment to and
identification with the idea of the nation, complicated by conflicts between
metropolis and hinterland within the nation and between the nation and the
empire that it had acquired; and (5) a third gender of so-called "sodomites"
and "sapphists" with life-styles seeking public recognition. Unifying all
these emergent tendencies was the sense of modernity: the notion that
history itself was progressive rather than static or circular, and that the
decisions taken today would necessarily shape the world of tomorrow.
In this course we will attempt to survey this ideological watershed and its
struggle between revolution and reaction, using samples from all of the
enormous variety of genres that made up the field of "literature" in that
age, which included poetry, fiction, fable, autobiography, biography,
philosophical treatise, history, drama, and opera.
January 27 -- Topic 1: Theorizing Enlightenment:
Immanuel Kant: "What Is Enlightenment?"
Michel Foucault: "On 'What Is Enlightenment?' "
Jurgen Habermas: "An Arrow Aimed at the Heart of the Present: On Michel Foucault's
Lecture on Kant's ''What Is Enlightenment?'"
February 3 -- Topic 2: The Renaissance Theodicy and Its Satires
Oral Report: Matt Williams
John Dryden: "Song for St. Cecilia’s Day"
Alexander Pope: Essay on Man
Samuel Johnson: Review of Soame Jenyns' A Free Inquiry into the Nature and
Origin of Evil
Voltaire: Candide
February 10 -- Topic 3: The New Economy: Credit, Markets and Commerce
Oral Report: Frank Crocco
Addison and Steele: Spectator Papers #3, 11, 69, and 450.
Bernard Mandeville, "The Grumbling Hive."
Selections from Mary Delarivier Manley and Thomas Baker: The Female Tatler
Selections from Edward Ward, The London Spy
Xeroxed: JGA Pocock, "The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology."
On reserve: Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, Chapter 5: "The Money Equivalent of Personal Values."
February 17: Presidents' Day: GC Closed
February 24 -- Topic 4: Analyzing the Enlightenment Subject, Part I
Oral Report: Laurence Lowe
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography
March 3 -- Topic 4: Analyzing the Enlightenment Subject, Part II
Oral Report: Sean Kelly
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Confessions (selections)
March 10 -- Topic 5: Print Culture
Oral Report: Laura Williams
Denis Diderot Article on "Encyclopedia" in the Encyclopedia
ancillary readings tba
March 17 -- Topic 6: Modernity and Religion
Oral Report: Doug Sparks
David Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (selections)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan the Wise
John Wesley: Selections from Sermons, "Thoughts on Slavery"
Emmanuel Swedenborg: Selections from Heaven and Hell
March 24 -- Topic 7: The Cult of the Primitive
Oral Report: Mary Zuber
Thomas Percy Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (selections)
James Macpherson Fingal (selections)
Thomas Chatterton Selection from the Rowley poems
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto.
March 31 -- Topic 8: The Cult of Feeling
Oral Report: Anu Malhotra
Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling
Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury: from Characteristics
April 7 -- Topic 9: Modernity and The Woman Question
Oral Report: Diane Treon
Mary Astell: Reflections upon Marriage (selections)
Mary Wollstonecraft: The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria.
For further readings by the English Bluestockings please click here for Diane's Links
And just in case you thought we were through with old Jean-Jacques, here is the bit about women and education from Emile.
Then there's the Revolution:
For Olympe de Gouges' take on how to feminize the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen, see de Gouges.
And for Condorcet's political brief on the same topic, see Condorcet.
April 14 -- Topic 10: Sodomites and Sapphists: The Gender Revolution
Oral Report: Diane Treon (again)
Thomas Gray: “On the Death of Richard West”
Selections from Randolph Trumbach's Sex and the Gender Revolution (pick up from Marilyn)
Selections from Rictor Norton’s online sourcebook: Homosexuality in
Eighteenth-Century England
April 21: Spring Break, no class.
April 28 -- Topic 11: The Scottish Enlightenment, Successionism and Racism
Oral Report: Nick Powers
Selections from essays by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and David Hume.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Part III, section 1
David Hume: "Of National Characters" (xerox)
John Millar, "Political Consequences of Slavery" from The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks.
May 5 -- Topic 12: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Part I
Oral Report: Eamon Brennan
Denis Diderot: Rameau's Nephew
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (selections)
May 12 -- Topic 12: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Part II
Oral Report: Josephine Hardy
Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man (selections)
William Godwin: Political Justice (selections)