This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module is designed to examine the overlapping influence of Early Modern and Enlightenment thinkers and writers mainly based in England, France and Germany. A particular focus is provided by the Parisian setting: several key figures (such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot) lived in Paris for a significant part of their lives, and Paris was a city second to none in its importance within a vast international exchange of ideas during the Enlightenment period. The module will encourage students to consider the historical contexts out of which the various texts emerge, and show how ideas passed between England, France, Germany and elsewhere. Attention will consistently be paid to the tension between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Europe. This will include allowing the students to understand debates, in the eighteenth century (and, if appropriate, since then), around the following issues: empiricism; sensationism; toleration; freedom of speech; aesthetics; literary genres; the 'pre-Romantic'.
2 hours per week, plus field trips
Essay - 100%
DIDEROT - 'Eulogy of Richardson';
DIDEROT (trans. and ed. R GOULBOURNE) - 'The Nun', OUP, 2005;
DIDEROT - 'The Vernet Promenade';
DIDEROT (trans. L TANCOCK) - 'Rameau's Nephew' and 'D'Alembert's Dream', Penguin, 1966;
KANT - 'What is Enlightenment?';
KLEIST - 'The Puppet Theatre', in 'Selected Writings' (trans. and ed. D CONSTANTINE), Hackett Publishing, 2004, pp. 411-16;
LESSING - 'Minna von Barnhelm';
VOLTAIRE (ed. N CRONK) - 'Letters concerning the English Nation', OUP, 1999;
VOLTAIRE - 'Anti-Pascal', in 'Lettres philosophiques' (Letter 26);
VOLTAIRE (trans. and ed. R PEARSON) - '"Candide" and Other Stories', OUP, 2008 (includes 'Zadig' and 'The Ingenu');
ROUSSEAU - 'Second Discourse', in 'The First and Second Discourses' (trans. R D MASTERS & J R MASTERS), Bedford/St Martin's, 1969;
ROUSSEAU (trans. and ed. P STEWART AND J VACHE) - 'Julie, or the New Héloïse', Dartmouth College, 1997;
ROUSSEAU (trans. and ed. R GOULBOURNE) - 'Reveries of the Solitary Walker', OUP, 2011
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will be able to explore the European Enlightenment by looking at English, French and German texts and thinkers;
Students will be able to analyse the ways in which the Enlightenment was a truly international phenomenon
Students will be able to explore how it was shadowed by a Counter-Enlightenment period, especially but not exclusively associated with Rousseau;
The module will enable students to question reductive notions of influence;
The module will enable students to see that, as a city, Paris was a city second to none in its importance for the European Enlightenment;
The module will, by virtue of its location and extracurricular opportunities, enable students to examine great buildings, gardens and works of art preserved in Paris that are connected with the Enlightenment era (e.g. the Luxembourg, the Louvre collections, the Tuileries, and the Palais Royal)
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