Join the Club: Conversation, Criticism, and Celebrity in the British Enlightenment

Catalog description

Before the 18th century was dubbed the Enlightenment, it was widely known as the Age of Criticism—a term that captures the growing cultural influence, not least in the English-speaking world, of largely secular commentary on 101 Literature society, politics, morality, and the arts. Suddenly, everyone was a critic, eager to express their opinions in one of the many sites for conversation and debate that were blossoming across Britain and its colonies. Those sites included institutions with brick-and-mortar locations—coffeehouses, taverns, and private clubs—but also the virtual forums made possible by the increasingly inescapable medium of print; parallels to our own social media-dazed era are easy to draw. With the Age of Criticism came a new kind of celebrity: the public intellectual. No man of letters was more renowned for his powers of criticism, conversation, and what he called “clubbability” than Samuel Johnson (1709-84), the gravitational center of our course. In addition to compiling the first English dictionary of note, Johnson was a gifted and hugely influential literary theorist, poet, political commentator, biographer, and satirist, as well as a legendarily pithy maker of small talk and a master of the English sentence. His overbearing but strangely lovable personality was preserved for posterity by his friend and disciple, James Boswell, who in 1791 published The Life of Johnson, the greatest and most entertaining of all literary biographies, which records, among much else, Johnson’s near-blindness, probable Tourette’s Syndrome, and selfless love of cats. Now, after the tercentenary of his birth, this seminar will reappraise Johnson’s legacy within a broad cultural survey of the British Enlightenment. Along with Johnson, Boswell, and other titans of 18th-century prose, such as Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Adam Smith, we will consider international…