ENGL729A: Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Postmodern Enlightenment

“Postmodern” and “Enlightenment” are historical and theoretical designations that rarely, if ever, occupy the same breath: postmodern connotes a challenge to orthodoxy, enlightenment an enthusiastic articulation of it.

This course challenges such a dualism by studying literary (and some visual) texts from the long eighteenth century and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, texts that repeatedly grapple with what it means to exist in society, what value might be, and how representation mobilizes and occludes subjectivity. We will study Enlightenment texts that begin to articulate a range of ideals and critiques concerning race, diaspora, gender, celebrity, and affective relations; these are paired with contemporary rewritings that explicitly revisit and rework the Enlightenment materials. Our operating premise is that the articulation and legacies of the Enlightenment—both as an ideal and as an uneven and inequitable practice—linger profoundly in our contemporary, postmodern moment.

Section(s):

Dr. Tita Chico
M 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Schedule of Classes
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