Lit & Culture: Enlightenment

Catalog description

This course explores that moment in the eighteenth century when the new emphasis on experimental science and philosophical empiricism coincided with elements of baroque style in music, art, and architecture to create those of human freedom and the social order that have come to be associated with the European Enlightenment. This course considers many of these ideas as they appear in works of literature, philosophy and science from Newton's Optics and History of the Royal Society, Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar, Voltaire's Candide and Paine's Age of reason to Gulliver's travels and the Essay on Man.