The eighteenth century is not just the age of enlightenment, science, and reason. It is also a period in which writers, artists and philosophers are deeply concerned with subjective experience, the power of the human senses, emotions and the imagination. Much attention is paid to the influence of the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful in Nature on the human psyche and body, as well as its destructive capabilities. This course investigates the various ways in which eighteenth-century culture, both written and visual, engages with these issues. Important concepts in this debate are: emotion, sensation, spectacle, sympathy, empathy, pathos, the human body, imagination and nature and ECCO.
Rooster
The timetable will be available from June 1st on the Internet.
Onderwijsvorm
Two-hour seminar per week.
A la carte- en contractonderwijs
Not available as modular course or a la carte.
Leerdoelen
By the end of the course, students will have learned how in the course of the eighteenth-century the awareness grew that human culture was not purely the product of the educated and rational mind, but also, and to a large extent, a product of the individual senses, emotions, as well as the imagination. They will have learned that sense and emotion is closely related to ethics and morality; they will understand the close relationship between artistic forms and emotional states; the genre of the sentimental novel; melancholy as source for artistic inspiration; and the growing fear in the eighteenth century of the dangerous consequences of excessive indulgence in sense and sentiment. Students should know how to use the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database (ECCO).
Literatuur
*Several e-texts available through links on the blackboard site an in ECCO. *Frances Burney, Evelina_ (Oxford World’s Classics). *
Daniel Defoe, The Storm_ (Penguin). *
Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year_ (Penguin). *
William Godwin, Fleetwood; or the New Man of Feeling_ (Broadview Press). *
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling_ (Oxford World’s Classics). *
Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance_ (Oxford World’s Classics).
Toetsing
7 informal reading reports that will facilitate classroom discussion (250 words each).
Participation in classroom discussion.
A mid-term essay (1500 words); deadline: the Friday of week 7.
An end-of-term essay (2500 words); deadline: the Friday of week 14.
Extra Credit assignment topics (5 ECTS): 1) A discussion of a literary text after 1800 (or a film) in which it becomes clear that the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility still lives on in British (popular) culture; or 2) a discussion of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Dutch text (in translation if needed) that shows that the cult of sensibility also found fertile ground across the North Sea.
Informatie
English Department, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 102c. Tel. 071-5272144. English@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Blackboard/webpagina
This course is supported by Blackboard.
Overzicht
Preliminaries: sensations, senses and emotions
Week 1: Daniel Defoe, The Storm (1719)
Week 2: Excerpts from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (Blackboard)
Week 3: Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (1922)
Week 4: Eliza Haywood: The Distressed Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse (Blackboard)
Aesthetic Sensibilities and Literary Landscapes
Week 5: Excerpts from Burke and Thomson (Blackboard)
Week 6: Poetic landscapes (Blackboard)
Week 7: Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
The Cult of Sensibility and the Sentimental Novel
Week 8: Graveyard poems (Blackboard)
Week 9: Excerpts from Smith and Hume (Blackboard)
Week 10: Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)
Week 11: Frances Burney, Evelina (1778)
Week 12: a selection of Odes, Elegies and other poetic sensibilities (Blackboard)
Afterword: A Nervous Wreck
Week 13: William Godwin, _Fleetwood; or the New Man of Feeling (1805)
_Week 14: end-of-term essay deadline.