Professor Helena
Rosenblatt
French 74000/Hist. 71000
W, 4:15-6:15, 3 credits
hrosenbl@hunter.cuny.edu
212 772 5346
The Enlightenment: Intellectual and Cultural Perspectives
This course will explore the intellectual and cultural history of the French
Enlightenment. We will read several classics of eighteenth century thought,
in other words, texts which belong to what Robert Darnton referred to as the
“High Enlightenment”; but we will also read some of the now forgotten
bestsellers of the so-called “Low Enlightenment.” We will examine
the Enlightenment’s views on religion, science, human nature, politics,
gender and race. Recent cultural perspectives will be considered, such as those
focusing on salons, restaurants, art exhibits and new reading practises. Finally,
we will grapple with both eighteenth century and modern critiques of the Enlightenment.
Requirements for this course are in-class participation including one short
presentation, a take-home midterm, and a 15-20 page paper on a topic previously
approved by the instructor.
Reading list:
For background: William Doyle, Old Regime France Oxford University
Press;
Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment. A. Goldhammer transl, Harvard
University Press
Sourcebook (recommended for purchase):
The Enlightenment. A Sourcebook and Reader, Paul Hyland ed., Routledge
Individual texts (recommended for purchase):
Crow, Thomas. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985
Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1995
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Maza, Sarah. Private Live and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres
of Prerevolutionary France. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1993.
McMahon, Darrin. Enemies of the Enlightenment. The French Counter-Enlightenment
and the Making of Modernity. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2001.
Montesquieu, The Persian Letters (Hackett ed.)
Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings (Hackett ed.) and Emile
(Allan Bloom ed., Basic Books)
And selections from:
Hesse, Carla. The Other Enlightenment. How French Women Became Modern.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003.
Postmodernism and the Enlightenment. Daniel Gordon, ed. NewYork: Routledge,
2001
Spang, Rebecca. The Invention of the Restaurant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000.
Steinbrügge, Lieselotte. The Moral Sex. Woman’s Nature in the
French Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Terrall, Mary. The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences
in the Enlightenment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006
What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question. Keith M.
Baker and Peter H. Reill eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001
This list will be supplemented with articles available electronically, as well
as an occasional hand-out.