Course Description
How the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements shaped and reshaped the human identity. Explores this subject through various works of French thinkers and artists of these two periods. The course will only be taught in Paris as a study abroad course.
Athena Title
Paris and its Symbols
Semester Course Offered
Offered summer semester every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The course considers how understandings of human nature and identity evolved in the modern period under the influence of the Enlightenment and Romantic movements. It is especially concerned with how these shifts unsettled traditional modes of self-understanding and how this is reflected in cultural patterns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Students explore these patterns as they manifest in various forms of artistic expression centering around Paris, in literature and the visual arts especially. The topical development of the course coincides with three historical periods. 1) The first section explores the various shifts brought about by the Reformation and Renaissance and how they eroded cultural patterns that typically shaped the human identity in the Middle Ages. 2) The second section of the course considers various thinkers and artists of the French Enlightenment in an effort to understand how the revival of classical notions of rationalism are reflected in the social and political patterns leading up to the French Revolution. 3) The third part of the course considers the social and ideological problems that were reflected in the Romantic revolt against neoclassicism. In this part of the course we also look forward a bit into the middle of nineteenth-century Paris to consider how these patterns continued to shape its culture. The course is conducted through lecture, discussion, reading, and student writing. Lecture and discussion revolve primarily around the various primary texts reflecting the historical periods and topics of the course. Students also read a selection of secondary texts that are designed to stimulate and guide class discussion as well as their execution of the course research paper. Various cultural artifacts on site in Paris are also treated as primary sources. The course's main teaching goal as a history course is to enable students to understand how various currents of the modern period have converged upon later understanding of human identity and the various problems associated with this. On its communication side, the course teaches practices of critical interpretation. The philosophical patterns that tend to define particular periods of history will always manifest in various ways in the artistic production of those periods. By instructing students as critics, the course enables them to learn how to discern and account for the artistic patterns that reflect such influence. This course meets the following General Education Abilities by accomplishing the specific learning objectives listed below: Communicate effectively through writing. Students are required to develop a written research project that applies the critical perspective developed in this class to some artifact or body of artifacts that, as public communication, gives rise to an outlook on the human identity. Students are also required to keep a journal in which they the interpret the concepts explored in the class in light of their daily encounters with Parisian culture and history. Communicate effectively through speech. Students enrolled in the course actively lead and participate in class discussion and are required to give oral presentations. As part of the research project for this course students may also develop videos and blogs as media for communicating the subjects of the course to the broader public. Critical Thinking (Engaging in complex thought, analysis, and reasoning): A main teaching goal of this course is critical analysis. Students are expected to understand why the patterns of change explored in our readings have built a certain kind of the modern identity, and they should come away from the class with new powers of insight into how these problems are reflected in their own public and private lives. Students are also expected to demonstrate this understanding through the critical interpretation of literary and artistic subjects. Moral Reasoning (Ethics): The primary and secondary readings for this course and also many of the Parisian artifacts students study accentuate the profound ethical concerns that coincide with the human struggle for identity. We are especially concerned with how identity concerns intersect with every collective effort to build just and functional polities. We are also concerned with many of the ways in which patterns of communication characteristic of modern public culture tend to weaken citizens' ability to exercise prudent judgment.
Topical Outline
1) THE WANING OF MEDIEVAL CULTURE IN THE MODERN PERIOD: The reentry of classical learning in the late medieval period and the social and ideological turmoil created by the Protestant Reformation serve as entry points into the course's explorations of human identity. This section of the course is especially concerned with how religious belief traditionally operates as a cultural resource. 2) THE RATIONAL ETHOS OF THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT This part of the course focuses upon the main currents of rationalism as transmitted through key figures of the French Enlightenment. We are especially concerned with how individual and social identities tend to be differentiated under the influence of rationalistic philosophies. We undertake a critical exploration of this problem as it is reflected in the neoclassical art of the late eighteenth century, and we also undertake to understand how this aspect of the Enlightenment tended to bear fruit in the revolutionary period. 3) THE ROMANTIC REVOLT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR LATER MODERNITY Paris became an important center for the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, and its reactionary features have special importance in France's ongoing struggle to come to terms with an emerging republican identity centering upon an ideal of liberty that champions individualism but also an ideal of fraternity that depends upon a strong notion of shared identity. Here we explore the main lineaments of romanticism in light of its social and political backdrop.