350:550

Index # - 75016

Distribution Requirement:  A3

Monday – 4:30 p.m.

MU 207

Lynn Festa

The Global Eighteenth Century

This course explores a range of eighteenth-century literary works—including texts by Defoe, Swift, Johnson, Sterne, Equiano, Edgeworth, Austen—with special attention to the way European encounters with peoples and societies in different parts of the globe shaped British cultural production. We will read these literary texts alongside historical works (excerpts from travel narratives, navigation journals, natural histories, Parliamentary debates) and philosophy (Locke, Hume, Smith, Burke) as well as selected recent criticism and theory (Agamben, Bhabha, Chakrabarty, Chow, de Man, Said, among others), in order to examine some of the questions currently of interest in the field of eighteenth-century studies: how did literary forms generate new ways of imagining relations to remote peoples? How do theories of “man” and of the “human”— including emerging conceptions of racial, ethnic, and gender difference— shape the idea of the individual so critical to accounts of the novel? How did the circulation of people, goods, ideas and technologies shape Enlightenment thought and its claims to universality? How might a vision of the global eighteenth century contest accounts of the period and its literature grounded in the category of the nation?

Course requirements: weekly discussion questions pre-circulated to the class email list; active class participation; one oral presentation on the secondary reading; one short and one long paper.