Course details
Name: ENGL - 340
Title: LITERATURE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT ERA
Section: 01
Semester: Spring - 2017
Credits: 3
Description:
A comparative study of literature and ideas in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on British, French, and German literature that reflects the legacy of the Enlightenment. We will read works by Diderot, Kant, Lessing (Nathan the Wise), Rousseau (First Discourse), Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Voltaire (Candide), and Margaret Cavendish (Blazing World). Major literary and philosophical trends are analyzed, including the rational and satirical attack on traditional values. The course emphasizes the diversity of genres that comprise the literature of the Enlightenment: polemical texts about the key debates of the day, including slavery, the definition of the human, and the concept of Enlightenment; novels from the satirical traditions developed in eighteenth-century France and Britain; opposition to the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Foucault, Horkheimer and Adorno); and dramatic and personal works (memoirs, letters) from authors writing in German. These genres will also work as means for exploring major cultural and historical developments during the period, including nationalism, salon and coffeehouse culture, the growth of bourgeois identity, secularism and atheism, as well as challenges to traditional values around gender.
This course takes place asynchronously online. There will likely be three contact points per week: a post due Monday night, responses to those posts due by Tuesday night, and a quiz or another form of response due by Thursday night. I am offering an online course because students have asked for more online courses in order to balance their commitments to work and school. However, online courses can be much more challenging than face-to-face courses because they demand that students become self learners. I recommend that students enrolling in this course have at least 60 credits, and a 3.0 GPA in the major. Students who are new to the university and struggling in the major may have a very difficult time with the online format of the course; the drop-out and failure rate for students in online courses is higher than in face to face courses. Please seriously consider whether this is a format that best fits your needs as a student.
Books:
The Book Store is able to offer these two books for $22.50, because I got a special ISBN from the publisher. If you buy them separately, their ISBNs are:
F. Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, Norton: ISBN 978-0393932522
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Norton: ISBN 978-0-393-95724-2
The third text is: John Robertson, The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0-19-9549178-7
The fourth text is: Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings. Penguin, ISBN 9780140433722
All other texts will be available as pdfs or online texts.
Last updated on 2018-01-23 By
Nielsen Wendy (nielsenw)
Schedule:
Graduation requirements:
- Any Literature (1e)
- Genre Study (Fiction)
- Pre-1800 (1b)
- Pre-1900 (1c)
- International Issues (3a)
- Women and Gender Studies (3c)
Teaching Faculty: Nielsen Wendy (nielsenw)
Is course canceled: No