Professor Mary Favret
433 Ballantine Hall
Office hours:
Thursday 10-12
Email: favretm@indiana.edu
Professor Dror Wahrman
714 Ballantine Hall
Thursday 2:30-4:00
dwahrman@indiana.edu
L680/H699: Introduction to the Eighteenth Century
Meetings: Thursdays 4-7pm, CAHI building
This course aims to give students a broad introduction to interdisciplinary work in the eighteenth century.
The course will be divided into units that investigate some of the narratives that have governed study of
the period (e.g. secularization and the place of God; commercialization; the so-called rise of the novel)
and compare the methodological approaches that underwrite these narratives. A subsequent unit of the
course will raise the question of the Euro-centrism of most constructions of the eighteenth-century. The
final section of the course will take up the theme of “Sensing and Feeling: The Embodiment of Experience
in the Eighteenth Century,” in preparation for the class’s participation in the May 2007 Workshop,
sponsored by IU’s Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Course Assignments:
In addition to participation in our weekly discussions, this course requires students to do four things, as
follows.
I. Weekly Discussion Questions
Students are responsible for formulating discussion questions based on the week’s readings in
preparation for each seminar meeting. A good discussion question indicates engagement with and
responsiveness to the written materials; it should be interesting to the group and truly open-ended. Please
submit your discussion questions by email – no more than a single double-spaced page please! –
no later than midnight the night before class. It is the responsibility of all participants to read through
the questions before coming to class.
II. Weekly Discussion Leaders
Two discussion leaders will be chosen for each week’s meeting, from different disciplines. There will be a
sign-up at the beginning of the semester. The job of discussion leaders is to sift through questions
submitted by seminar members and select some as the basis for organizing that day’s work in the
seminar. Seminar leaders should feel free to amend the questions and add their own, bring in additional
materials, stage debates, or ask the class to focus on particular texts or passages from the reading; but
their goal should always be to identify the most salient issues and provide a helpful and stimulating
approach to the day’s materials.
III. Comparative research projects
We have designed a project to allow you to practice with and assess some of the digital resources now
available to scholars of the eighteenth century, to understand their specific virtues and limitations. You will
be asked to choose from a list of several topics or questions, and to use the resources of several different
databases to pursue that question. Choose from the following on-line archives:
1. ECCO: Eighteenth-Century Catalog Online
2. 18th c. periodical runs (newspapers and or journals): including Early American Newspapers,
Series I, Ii, III;
3. Visual databases: AMICO Library (Art Museum Image Consortium); CAMIO RLG's Catalog of
Art Museum Images Online; RLG Cultural materials;
4. Literary Databases : English Poetry Database; Early American Fiction, 1789-1835; Early
English Prose Fiction; Eighteenth-Century Fiction; English Drama
5. Colonial/Imperial databases: Empire On-Line or Early Encounters in North America
Your project ought to show two things:
1) intelligence and imagination in designing your path of research (which texts will you chose to pursue the
question and why?)
2) an analysis of the differences between the different archives you used, what they allowed you to find
and what limits they imposed. You will write a five-six page report explaining your procedures,
summarizing your findings and offering a comparative analysis of the resources you used.
You will be given a more detailed description of this experimental project in the following weeks.
IV. Final project: Annotated Bibliography
For the end of the semester, each student will produce an annotated bibliography on a delimited topic in
18th c. studies. You should aim to have a topic determined and approved by Mary or Dror no later than the
week after spring break. This is an occasion for you to conduct a close survey of materials – primary and
secondary – relevant to a topic that interests you, and to classify and evaluate them. Because you will all
be giving your annotated bibliographies to your classmates, they will also serve as teaching and research
resources for everyone in the group – real intellectual cooperation, In other words, your work here will
benefit not only yourself, but your cohort in 18th c. studies.
You will be given a more detailed description of the project in the following weeks.
Schedule of Classes
books marked by * are available at the bookstore
Thursday, January 11
Introduction
Unit 1: Secularization
Thursday, January 18: session 1 – broad themes
Jonathan Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization’, American
Historical Review 108:4 (2003), pp. 1061-1080
David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800, Harvard UP,
2001, pp. 22-40
Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Duke UP, 1991, chap. 5:
‘Dechristianization and secularization’ (pp. 92-110)
R. Wallis and S. Bruce, ‘Secularization: The Orthodox Model’, in S. Bruce (ed.), Religion and
Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, Oxford,
1992, pp. 8-30
Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, Baylor UP, 2006, introduction (pp. 1-33)
*
Voltaire, Candide; together with Daniel Gordon’s introduction
Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1775), available at
http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Voltaire0265/OnToleration/HTMLs/0029_Pt05_Lisbon.html
William Cowper, The Task (1783), second book, excerpt
**Special guest: Professor Constance Furey
Thursday, January 25: secularization, focus session: Blake
From Blake’s writings:
Mock On, Mock ON Voltaire, Rousseau
There is No Natural Religion
Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
“America: A Prophecy”
Last three available at the Online Blake Archive:
http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/indexworks.htm. Read the first version offered and
examine illustrations (you might want to click on “textual transcription, under “Show Me” at
the bottom of each page).
Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, Chicago, 2003, pp. 1-77
E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, New York, 1993,
Intro and 1-21; 65-114
John Mee, ‘Millenarian Visions and Utopian Speculations’, in The Enlightenment World, ed. Martin
Fitzpatrick et al.(London and NY; Routledge, 2004), pp. 536-550
Pickett and Strathman, ‘Blake and the Bible’, in Nicholas Williams (ed.), Palgrave Advances in
Blake Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
Unit 2: Commercialization
Thursday, February1: session 1– broad themes
*
Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth
Century’, Past and Present 182 (2004), pp. 85-142
John Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics’, in N. McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer
Society, Bloomington, 1985, pp. 197-262
T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American
Independence, Oxford, 2004, chap. 1 (pp. 1-29)
Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century,
Chicago, 2006, introduction and chap. 6 (pp. 1-6, 149-176)
Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, Baltmore,
2006, pp. 67-82, 111-132
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, ed. K. Sutherland, introduction, and pp. 1-89, 338-373
Thursd ay, Feb 8: Commercialization, focus session: Slavery
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823, Cornell UP, 1975,
pp. 39-49 (“What the abolitionists were up against”), 213-254 (“The Quaker ethic and the
antislavery international”), 343-385 (“The preservation of English liberty I”); all reprinted in
T. Bender (ed.), The Antislavery Debate, Berkeley, 1992, pp. 15-103
Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2”, American
Historical Review 90:3 (1985), pp. 547-66. If you want fully to understand the argument
about the relationship of the market to antislavery, including some of Haskell’s own
terminology (“recipe of knowledge” and “the problem of the starving stranger”), take a look
at Part 1 in the previous issue. Both are reprinted in T. Bender (ed.), The Antislavery
Debate, Berkeley, 1992.
Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History,
Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 3-79, 242-252
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, University of North
Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 1-30 (Introduction), 451-462 (Epilogue)
Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representation of Slavery in England and America 17801865, Routledge, 2000, pp. 1-40 (introduction and part of chap. 2) + plates 1-3
**Special guests: Professors Jonathan Elmer and Sarah Knott
Unit 3: The Rise of the Novel
Thursday, February 15: Rise of the Novel, focus session: Laclos
*
Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, Introduction, *Epistolary Histories; Letters, Fiction, Culture*
(Charlottesville, U.of Virginia Press, 2000)
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Oxford, 1995, entire
**Special guest: Professor Jerome Brillaud
Thursday, Feb 22: session 2 – broad themes
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1-70
Patricia M. Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven:
Yale UP, 2006), pp. 1-27; 277-85
April Alliston, Virtue’s Faults (Stanford; Stanford UP, 1996), 77-113
Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau; The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in The
Great Cat Massacre (New York; Basic Books, 1984), pp. 215-56)
Mark Salber Phillips, ‘“If Mrs Sure be not sorry for poor King Charles”: History, the Novel, and the
Sentimental Reader’, History Workshop Journal 43 (1997), pp. 111-132
(http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/1997/43/111)
Sandra Macpherson, ‘Injuring Love’, in her Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel
Form, Johns Hopkins UP, forthcoming
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace,
1670-1820, Berkeley, 1994, pp. xiii-xxiv
Unit 4: Enlightenment
Thursday, March 1: session 1 – broad themes
Peter Gay, ‘Overture’, in his The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1966),
pp. 3-27, 127-159
John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760, Cambridge,
2005, introduction
Karen O’Brien, ‘The Feminist Critique of Enlightenment’, in The Enlightenment World, pp. 621-634
Silvia Sebastiani, ‘Race, Women, and Progress in the Late Scottish Enlightenment’, in S. Knott
and B. Taylor (eds.), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, Palgrave, 2005, pp. 75-96
Isaac Kramnick, The Portable Enlightenment Reader, pp. 1-7 (Kant), 17-21 (Diderot), 39-48
(Bacon, Newton), 51-60 (Voltaire), 185-202 (Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume), 395-441
(Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau x 2)
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 1762
(http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/diderot/rameau_E.htm)
Thursday, Feb 22: Enlightenment, focus session: Exploring the South Seas
P. J. Marshall & Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the
Age of Enlightenment, Harvard UP, 1982, chap. 9: ‘The Exploration of the Pacific 17601800’ (pp. 258-298)
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century,
London, 2003, chap. 2: ‘The Island Race: Captain Cook and English Ethnicity’ (pp. 54-91)
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific,
Harvard UP, 1991, pp. 125-162 (‘The European Appropriation of Indigenous Things’)
Greg Dening, Performances, Chicago, 1996, pp. 128-167: ‘Possessing Tahiti’
Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in The South Seas 1680-1840, Chicago, 2001, pp. 3-15
(introduction), 76-131 (chaps. 3, 4)
Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters 1760-1820, Penn
UP, 2005, pp. 1-25 (excerpt from introduction), 144-167 (chap. 5)
Denis Diderot, ‘Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, excerpt in Kramnick, The Portable
Enlightenment Reader, pp. 640-44
HAPPY SPRING BREAK!
[DETAILS OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE SYLLABUS WILL FOLLOW SOON]
Unit 5: Ancien Regimes and Revolutions
Thursday, March 22: working class politics
Thursday, March 29: ancien regimes and revolutions
Thursday, April 5: Revolutions, focus session: The Declaration of Independence
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, Harvard UP, 2007
Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance,
Stanford, 1993, selections
J. Derrida, ‘Declarations of Independence’, New Political Science 15 (1986), pp. 7-17
Unit 6: Toward the 18c workshop: Sensing and Feeling – the Embodiment of Experience in the
Eighteenth Century
Thursday, April 12
Thursday, April 19