FIRST YEAR SEMINAR
SPRING 2005
REVOLUTION AND THE LIMITS OF REASON
Conceived as a direct continuation of the fall
semester, the spring offering of First-year Seminar begins with the eventful
culmination of Enlightenment thinking, and then explores the complex and
ambivalent aftermath throughout the 19th Century, with a few highly selective
steps taken into the modern era. We will start with texts by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, all of which
relate to two major political crises at the end of the 18th Century, The
American and French Revolutions. The cataclysmic violence of the latter, and
the subsequent rise of Napoleon, along with the growth of modern industry and
imperial aspirations in Europe, led to a period of disillusionment and an even
more radical questioning of the newly established bourgeois values. Despite the
fact that two notoriously difficult German thinkers, Kant and Hegel, may have
given rational idealism its firmest footing, as the 19th Century progressed,
whether through romantic art and literature (Goya, Blake, Shelley and Emerson),
the socio-economic criticism of Marx, or the later philosophy of Nietzsche, the
legacy of the Enlightenment, the ironic consequences of an overconfident
intellectualism, could be met with a sometimes withering critique. At the same
time, Darwin's theories of evolutionary development, published at mid-century,
pose a new perspective on the human species and its relationship to nature. We
will represent modernity with three writers whose work directly relate to
issues raised in the fall semester: Freud, who poses a revolutionary theory of
the mind; Lu Xun, who, as a member of a generation often referred to as The
Chinese Enlightenment, specifically questions the Confucian tradition; and
Chinua Achebe, who is considered one of the founding figures of post-colonial
African fiction. There will be supplementary events including guest lectures,
films, panel discussions, readings and performances every Monday at 4:30 PM.
Special Note: All students will be required to read
The Age of Revolution: 1789 - 1848 by
Eric Hobsbawm over the January Intersession.
Other
texts include:
Achebe: Things
Fall Apart
Blake: The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Darwin: The
Origin of Species
Dostoevsky: Notes
from the Underground
Freud:
Civilization and Its Discontents
Kant: Groundwork
for the Metaphysics of Morals
Lu Xun: Selected Stories
Marx: The
Communist Manifesto, The German
Ideology, and Theses on Feuerbach
Nietzsche:
Beyond Good and Evil
Rousseau: The
Origin of Inequality
Shelley: Frankenstein
Weber: The Protestant
Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism
Wollstonecraft: A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman