Enlightenment Subjects and Subjections

Catalog description

This semester, we will read broadly in literary, philosophical, and political works of the Enlightenment and more recent critical-theoretical texts as we ask how authors of the period understood the construction of the subject (or self) and the powers that shape that subject. We will focus on works that unsettle the neutrality of the categories of “man” or “citizen” and allow us to consider the exclusions central to their constitution: foreigner, servant, woman, slave, the poor. Alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical theoretical texts, we will read Abigail Bailey’s memoir of domestic violence, Pierre Marivaux’s play in which servants seize their masters’ roles (briefly), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, debates about the period's “poor laws,” and the anonymously authored Woman of Colour, among other texts.