FREN 2600

Legends of Enlightenment

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

Some celebrate the Enlightenment for its foundational precepts of liberty, reason, and progress, whereas others criticize it for entrenching exclusionary principles and promoting a totalizing worldview. As an intellectual movement prioritizing knowledge, freedom, and happiness, the Enlightenment ushers in revolutionary developments in art, science, literature, philosophy, and politics, yet many also condemn it as grounded in the West, and as failing to offer a voice to all. This course examines such underlying Enlightenment paradoxes through the varied perspectives of those reflecting upon it from different contexts, and as portrayed in the legends they construct. Close and comparative analysis of texts and visual culture will allow us to examine Enlightenment innovations in ideas as well as in literary forms, and to raise questions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. We will explore a range of different works to evaluate both the ideals and the flaws of the Enlightenment, as well as its ongoing legacies.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)
Language Requirement Satisfies Option 1.

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