The Eighteenth-Century Studies minor at Indiana University (Bloomington) offers concentrated study of the inter-connected cultures of a period extending from the late seventeenth to the turn of the nineteenth centuries. The minor is open to all graduate students. The minor requires 16 credit hours in courses approved by the Program in Eighteenth-Century Studies; courses for the minor must be taken in at least three different departments, including the student’s own. (Exceptions will only be entertained in unusual circumstances.) At least one approved seminar (usually at the 700-level) is needed to complete the minor.
All students must take the PhD minor gateway course, a broad introduction to interdisciplinary work in the eighteenth century. In spring 2007 this course will be taught by Mary Favret (English) and Dror Wahrman (History) (see their L680/H699 syllabus).
Below is a tentative list of eighteenth-century courses to be offered in 2006/7. If you are aware of a course not on this list, or for any other queries, please contact Dror Wahrman, dwahrman @ indiana.edu
Guillaume Ansart, French (fall)
F825 Writing History in France: From Enlightenment to Romanticism.
The course will be taught in English with readings in French. The reading
list includes Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condorcet, Constant, Michelet,
Tocqueville, and Fustel de Coulanges.
Jerome Brillaud, French (fall)
I will be teaching an undergrad course FRIT F451/17055 on the libertine
novel in the fall 06. It's a 400 level course. I would have to check but
grad students may be allowed to sign up. Here is the description:
Ce cours portera sur le roman libertin au 18e siècle. Nous lirons plusieurs romans dont Les Liaisons dangereuses de Laclos, Thérèse philosophe de Boyer d’Argens et des extraits de L’Histoire de ma vie de Casanova. Nous nous intéresserons tout particulièrement aux modes d’expression de la volupté et du désir, à la rhétorique de la séduction et à l’initiation philosophique comme constantes du roman libertin. En plus des lectures, nous analyserons plusieurs adaptations cinématographiques des Liaisons dangereuses.
Lectures obligatoires: Boyer d'’Argens, Thérèse philosophe; Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses; Vivant Denon, Point de lendemain; Casanova, Histoire de ma vie; Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir
Auerlian Craiutu, Political science (spring)
After the Revolution
Will include Burke,
Constant,
and Tocqueville.
Konstantin Dierks, History (fall semester)
H650 Colloquium in American History (aka G620 Colloquium in American
Studies), topic: Early America
This course spans what has been traditionally divided into two periods of
American history -- the “Colonial” and the “Revolutionary” -- and situates
them both in the context of new conceptual frameworks of the “Atlantic
world” and “the global.” After briefly examining the changing history of
Early American history writing, the course readings will focus on recent
historiography, within more comprehensive bibliographical coverage. Topics
will include: Native Americans, slavery, the consumer revolution, and
empire- and nation-building. Treating Early American history both as an
energetic field of historical inquiry, and as a substantive history to be
taught to undergraduates, this course aims to help prepare graduate
students both for qualifying exams and for teaching.
Mary Favret, English, and Dror Wahrman, History (spring)
Introduction to the Eighteenth Century
Core
course of the PhD Minor in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Connie Furey, Religious Studies (spring)
In the Spring, I'll be teaching R531, a grad course that "piggy-backs" on
an undergraduate course entitled "Christianity 1500-present." I always do
separate grad student sections, and if I had students interested in taking
it for the 18th c minor, I would happily focus all of their material on
that period.
Oscar Kenshur, Comparative Literature
C529 Topic: The Modern Self
The course will focus on concepts of the self in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Since concepts of self are necessarily intertwined
with ideas about the relationship between the individual and intellectual
authority, between the individual and the social order, and between the
individual and God, the course will inevitably touch on psychology,
epistemology, ethics, political theory, and religious thought. Since our
texts will include works from a variety of literary and philosophical
genres, and since a knowledge of earlier developments will be necessary
for an understanding of why explorations of the nature of the self form a
central concern throughout the eighteenth century, the course will be
amount to a high-level introduction to early-modern literature and
thought. It will also provide an indispensable background for those
interested in nineteenth and twentieth-century debates about subjectivity.
A tentative list of authors to be discussed includes the following: Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Defoe, Shaftesbury, Pope, Joseph Butler,Voltaire, Hume, Sterne, Rousseau, Diderot, and Goethe.
Deidre Lynch, English (fall)
L741: Romances, Histories, and Hoaxes
Over the last decade, Romanticists have come to recognize, belatedly, that
the student of this period has novels as well as poems to read. This
seminar introducing Romantic fiction takes its cue from two premises that
are proving crucial to this recognition.
We will be responding, first, to the premise that "the rise of the novel"--the novel's consolidation as a genre, and its acquisition of a canon, of a tradition, and of authority in the literary field--does not occur in the mid-eighteenth century, Ian Watt notwithstanding. It is, on the contrary, a phenomenon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when "novels" first became a distinctive category in booksellers' catalogues and when there was a dramatic upsurge in the number of novels published annually. We will also be exploring, second, and at greater length, how the novel's ascendancy at this moment depended on a dialectic between the two opposing impulses that together Romantically reshaped the fictional field. On the one hand, the Romantic novel has at its core the impulse (also an element in the antiquarian and literary historical interests of the era) to revive romance--to recover archaic ways of believing and of suspending disbelief that were felt to be vanishing into the nation's past. On the other hand, the novel's "rise" in the generic hierarchy in the early nineteenth century had much to do with the savvy way in which novelists, composing what we might call "footnote novels," learned to forge the strategic alliances that linked their fictions to the new discourses of the modern fact, and to the nation-making knowledge genre of history particularly.
To investigate this paradoxical dynamic, we will (armed by preliminary reading in theories of fiction, probability, and of history) work our way through a reading list that opens with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765)--which was presented in its first edition as fact and in its second as fiction--and that has for a terminus James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)--which begins and ends with an elaborate spoof on historians' notions of evidence. In between, we'll be reading novels from a list that at this point includes works by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley. (And we'll also be considering, more briefly, poets such as Macpherson, Chatterton, Byron, and Mary Tighe, so as to engage Romantic poetry's resurrections of romance.) As we shall see, novelists responded enthusiastically to the hoaxes that shadowed print culture during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; these novelists were well aware that the literary history in which they were taking up their allotted place was in this period something as much forged as found. To read them properly therefore might entail doing more than looking for the history in their fictions. We need to follow their lead and look for what is fictional, romantic even, about the seemingly objective discursive practices of history and criticism.
Bill Rasch, Germanic Studies (spring?)
Course on violence (revolution, state violence, war) in Germany that
covers basically the time-period between 1789-1848, with at least half the
course on the Fr. Rev. and the Napoleonic wars, German nationalism, etc.,
i.e., 1789-1815. Reading knowledge of German strongly recommended, thought
most of the texts (literary, historical, theoretical) exist in
translation. Discussion in English