ENGL 341 B1: Enlightenment, Epistemology, Ethics

C. Harol

This course will study literature of the long eighteenth century (1660-1800) via the lens of the questions: What can we know? What can we not know? Why? How? How is knowledge tied to power and ethics? What kind of special knowledge can literature produce? Why and how? The goals of this course include: understanding the history of the idea of “Enlightenment”; understanding how Enlightenment modes of knowledge impact: literature; politics; gender and sexuality; race, slavery and colonialism; learning methods of historical analysis of texts as well as developing methods of close reading.