Sections offered FALL 2023:

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

The 1700s in European history are sometimes called an “Age of Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason” and a handful of well-known writers (Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant etc.) are then treated as human embodiments of the period. In this course, we will read those authors but also many others as we think about the varieties of knowledge available in (and about) the eighteenth century. Remember, this was an era before electric lighting, before wood-pulp paper, and (in most places) before mass literacy. What did writing, reading, and exchanging ideas look like in the eighteenth century and where and when did people do these things? How did writers in Europe know about other parts of the world, what did they know, and to what extent does that “knowledge” continue to shape our lives today? Do readers’ reactions to a piece of writing change with time and place?

Among the specific topics we are likely to cover (subject to change): skepticism and miracles; discipline and education; market freedoms and moral economy; science and sensibility; ideas of human nature, empire, slavery, and national regeneration.

Readings will be drawn primarily from eighteenth-century materials (primary sources) along with historians’ interpretations and analysis (secondary sources). Students should be prepared to present their own work and to comment constructively on each others’ writing and ideas. No prior study of the time or place is assumed, but all students are expected to work hard and be open to learning something new. Final grades will be based on class preparation and participation (including reading reports and discussion-board posts), 40%; “Enlightenment today” presentation (identify and present on a recent media item relevant to the course), 5%; two papers (5-6 pages), 15% each; and a final project-presentation, 25%

Sections offered FALL 2023:

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

This course explores the tangled questions that inform gendered, racial and cultural relationships as expressed within a range of modern novels in French, all authored by women. Our narratives will include the part-narrative, part-epistolary 1900 fiction of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery — who took as her pen name “Rachilde.” Her hybrid novel The Juggler studies the daring effort of an iconoclastic Creole widow to carve an identity within the stifling bourgeois norms and conventions of turn-of-the-century Paris. From the French Antilles and the racial and cultural context to which Eliante longs to return, we will travel to Belgium with Jacqueline Harpman’s novel Orlanda (1996) and the subtle, contemporary dystopia of a young woman’s journey to awareness of her confinement within the roles of successful professor and beloved companion. Written as a riposte to the conformist ending of Virginia Woolf’s romp through gendered convention in her 1928 novel, Orlando, Harpman’s narrative engages fantasy to oppose gendered norms through the conflict opposing two halves of a single person : the timid, feminine Aline and her outrageous masculine double, Orlanda. Fred Vargas’s Seeking Whom He May Devour takes us to a corner of rugged, rural France, and a climate of suspicion and superstition, where we will pursue the entwined narratives of a young African man and a young French woman composer/plumber/truck-driver as they negotiate cultural hostility motivated by racial and gendered prejudice. Just as the text overturns certain assumptions (among them, the assumption that its author is a man), it also overturns literary as well as sociocultural conventions. Selected scenes from the novel’s film adaptation will be consulted to test, contest and/or expand our reading. How to Cook One’s Husband African Style (2000) by Cameroonian immigrant to Paris Calixthe Beyala, pursues similar questions of racial and gendered identity within a contemporary Paris as its protagonist struggles to reconcile her traditionalist African past with a cosmopolitan present filled with false solutions. Across these various narratives and their differing geographies, we will be constantly attentive to the formal choices made by our fictions as they explore gendered, racial and cultural tensions. Student performance will be evaluated on the basis of a range of activities, including active class participation ; an oral presentation ; a midterm essay exam or analytical paper; and a final exercise consisting of a choice between an essay exam or an analytical paper. A final creative piece in dialogue with one of our novels (a “long-lost” chapter? An epilogue?) will be accepted pending permission of the professor.