LIT 245 - The Enlightenment: Centers, Peripheries, & Legacies

In his essay, “What is Enlightenment,” Foucault asks us to resist “the blackmail of the Enlightenment” - the widespread notion that we must take a side. Should we defend the Enlightenment as the birth of modern Western culture that bequeathed a legacy of liberty, human rights, democracy, and human progress, or condemn it as a pernicious era that gave rise to scientific racism and other dehumanizing ideas and structures? Rejecting this binary, Foucault invites us to approach the Enlightenment as its offspring, like it or not. Before embracing or rejecting, we must first study the Enlightenment to understand what it was and how it helped shape who we are and the world we inhabit, with all its promise and its horrors.
This course offers an introduction to the Enlightenment through literary texts that popularized the movement across Europe in the eighteenth century. We will read canonical and peripheral primary and secondary texts that prompt questions related to justice, equality, and community. With Paris as our center and St. Petersburg as our periphery, we will also include non-geographic peripheries - authors marginalized by gender, creed, or race. 

Over the course of the semester, we will discover that many familiar aspects of our lives have a distinct and not-so-distant history in the Enlightenment, including habits of cultural consumption; entire academic disciplines; assumptions about creativity, individuality, and private vs. public; discourses on progress, civilization, race, gender, and inequality; and the very notion of “critical thinking.”

Satisfies the Justice, Equality, & Community requirement (JEC).
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, & Rhetoric requirement (LTRQ)
Counts toward the Global Literary Theory major as one of the six literature courses on a specific period.
Counts toward the Russian Studies major.
Counts toward the Russian Language & Literature major.
Counts toward the French & Francophone Studies major as one of the approved courses outside the department.
Fulfills an elective for the English major and minor.
Counts toward the Russian minor.
Counts toward the interdisciplinary minor in Global Literary Theory.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
No knowledge of French or Russian required or expected. All readings and discussion in English