Browsing by Subject "Enlightenment"

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Between Christ and Achilles : Christian humanism in crisis and a new heroic ideal in English fiction, 1713-1813
(2021-05-07) Hall, Kirsten Anne; Barchas, Janine; Hedrick, Elizabeth A.; Bertelsen, Lance; Bowden, Martha; Marshall, Ashley
This dissertation is about the disintegration of Renaissance Christian humanism in the Enlightenment and the literary efforts to reunite those fragments. The tension between the classical philosophical tradition and Christian theology is an old problem, one that up until the Renaissance had found compromise in Christian humanism. Under the changing historical conditions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, it resurfaced as a new problem that old solutions could no longer manage. In England, the so-called “latitudinarians,” English theologians of the Restoration whose ideas were to mark the mainstream of Anglican thought well into the 1800s, were among the last torchbearers of Christian humanism and yet largely responsible for its decline. The latitudinarian emphasis on ethics over doctrine, in the wake of the civil strife of the seventeenth century, rendered the ethically-based systems of ancient writers newly tempting, opening the gates to the rising tide of freethinkers, atheists, and deists who in their efforts to free morality from the shackles of religion, turned to classical moral philosophy not as a complement to but as a replacement for Christian moral teachings. This conflict was memorably articulated by Richard Steele at the start of the century when he asked in The Christian Hero, “Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations?” While Steele’s concern that his contemporaries had become too enthralled with the ancient world at the expense of Christianity is echoed throughout the period, what makes Steele’s essay especially noteworthy is the way he carves out a place for literature’s crucial role in this philosophical and religious crisis. Hs rallying cry for “Elegant Pens” to take up the cause of Christianity and win back not just the minds, but the hearts of its readers by offering attractive and powerful Christian “heroes” is one, I argue, that prompts the response of early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and, later, Jane Austen.
Bourbon reform and buen gusto at Mexico City's Royal Theater
(2011-05) Zakaib, Susan Blue; Deans-Smith, Susan, 1953-; Twinam, Ann
During the late eighteenth century, as part of a broader reform initiative commonly referred to as the “Bourbon reforms,” royal officials attempted to transform theatrical productions at Mexico City’s Real Coliseo (Royal Theater). Influenced by new intellectual trends in Spain, especially the neoclassical movement, reformers hoped that theater could serve as a school of virtue, rationality and good citizenship. This essay analyzes the theatrical reform effort, traces its foundations from sixteenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century Mexico, and seeks to explain why the initiative failed to transform either the Coliseo’s shows or its audience’s artistic predilections. It argues that the initiative was unsuccessful for three primary reasons. First, reformers did not have the power to compel impresarios and actors to obey their new regulations, and economic constraints sometimes forced officials to bend their strict aesthetic standards to appease the audience's largely baroque predilections. Second, Mexico City’s diverse and thriving public sphere made imposing a new popular culture profoundly difficult, especially given that reformers’ one-dimensional vision of neoclassicism failed to account for the variety and debate within this movement. Consequently, the theater added fuel to public debate over the definition of buen gusto (good taste), rather than merely instructing passive citizens as reformers had hoped. Finally, widespread public derision of the performing profession meant that many spectators did not take actors seriously as teachers of morality, taste and rationality. Actors’ reputation as immoral lowlifes, which derived in part from late-sixteenth century debates in Spain over morality and illusion in drama, complicated reformers' already difficult project of transforming the theater into a school of sociability and citizenship.
Competing Enlightenment approaches to religion and toleration : Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville and Rawls
(2012-12) Areshidze, Giorgi; Pangle, Thomas L.
I present a critical analysis and comparison of the early modern critiques of Christianity and of the institutional strategies for achieving religious toleration through an examination of the thought of Rawls Hobbes, Locke, and Tocqueville. I argue that the contemporary dialogue over religion is limited by its uncritical acceptance of the American experience with the constitutional regime of religious freedom, which takes its bearings from the scheme of religious disestablishment that Locke articulated in the Letter Concerning Toleration. The aim of my dissertation is to correct this distortion of the history and theory of liberalism, to restore the original theological and practical flexibility of liberal politics, and to articulate competing constitutional arrangements for theocratic reform and transition that are not exhausted by “neutrality.” Instead of presenting a monolithic argument in favor of disestablishment, the early modern liberal thinkers favored a combination of different institutional and educational strategies, tailored to national and local conditions, for reforming the Church and for advancing popular enlightenment. I turn to Hobbes and Hume to recover this case for religious establishment, and contrast and compare their arguments to those of Locke and Smith. In revealing the peculiar strengths and weakness of both church establishment and free exercise, early modern rationalists presented a set of flexible institutional and practical guidelines that could inform political statesmanship in its pursuit of the agenda of popular religious reform. Through an analysis of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the Old Regime, I show that the uncritical focus on Locke’s regime of disestablishment captures only one side of the complex and multifaceted historical experience of liberalism with religion in Europe and America, and does not do justice to the rich theoretical and political debate that shaped liberalism. Not just Hobbes and Hume, but even Locke himself, in his early Two Tracts and even in the Letter, presented strong practical arguments for and theoretical justifications of limited but real state religious establishments as institutional engines of theological reform. The recovery of this debate is meant to contribute to the capacity of liberal theory to engage in a critical dialogue with non-liberal religion, and to its capacity to articulate competing constitutional and institutional structures that , while unfamiliar to us, may be more suited for theocratic transitions in non-Western and non-Christian societies than the regime of neutrality.
The end of deception in modern politics : Spinoza and Rousseau
(2011-12) Rotner, Loren Justin; Stauffer, Devin, 1970-; Tulis, Jeffrey
“Enlightenment,” declared Kant, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” an immaturity maintained by all those “dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his natural endowments.” As a result, more and more self styled philosophic critics of the Enlightenment have accused Kant and his less impressive ilk of perpetuating a grand, even unconscious, farce: their naïve vision of liberation was but a magnificent ruse for compelling obedience to a new host of dogmas and gods. The power and influence of this sort of critique has provoked a wide ranging and lively reappraisal of the degree to which the philosophers of the Enlightenment were founders of a regime rooted ultimately in deception or emancipation. In order to enter and evaluate that debate, I take up the views of Spinoza, a founder of the Enlightenment, and one of its greatest critics, Rousseau. According to both Spinoza and Rousseau, all societies, no matter how Enlightened, have to perpetuate deceptions in order to make political rule both legitimate and acceptable to the ruled: humans are not naturally meant for political rule or political life. They both agree that the liberation of talents is at the core of the Enlightenment’s approach to achieving this kind of legitimacy. But while the liberation of talents is considered an unequivocal good by Spinoza even if that liberation must have as its basis several fundamental deceptions, I argue on behalf of Rousseau that the Enlightenment perpetuates a deep moral corruption of man by stimulating within him the desire for an impossible celebrity that could never truly or authentically satisfy his deepest needs.
The enlightened Christian? Hannah More in a human rights picaresque
(2009-12) Steel, Connie Michelle; Garrison, James D.; Harlow, Barbara
This report explores and questions the history of human rights rhetoric through the 18th century anti-slave trade poem of Hannah More, Slavery, a poem. Hannah More used the term ‘human rights’ more than 150 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, when historians and political scientists track the history of human rights, it is frequently presented as “from Locke through Paine” as part of a narrative of the “coming of age” of democracy in a longer quest for rights stemming from 18th century revolutions and radicalism. This report looks instead at the episodic nature of human rights rhetoric through 18th century ideas of the human. As argued here, More’s use of the term ‘human rights’ indicates an attempt to reconcile the tension between Enlightenment and Christian discourses to promote the anti-slave trade cause.
Fostering Enlightenment Coffeehouse Culture in the Present
(2015-05) McComb, Sofie; Vaughn, James
The Enlightenment was a seventeenth and eighteenth century intellectual movement based on the notions of reason and progress that fundamentally altered human society. The unique, intellectual era gave rise to the public sphere, a realm in which individuals could come together to freely identify and discuss social issues and form critical public opinions of civil and political society. Coffeehouses of the Enlightenment were a spatialized version of this public sphere as they housed and promoted the critical and rational debate that formed public opinion. These unique social institutions were highly representative of the intellectual and social culture of the Enlightenment and greatly augmented social interaction and civic engagement. Through examining and comparing the culture found in Enlightenment coffeehouses and the culture found in modern society, we can determine how to foster “coffeehouse culture” in modern times in order to augment social discourse and civic life. Examining modern culture, it can be seen that the reflective and hypercritical culture found in Enlightenment coffeehouses occurs in pockets of society today but has been greatly diminished, due to a lack of civic participation. The public man, well expressed in Enlightenment coffeehouse culture, has been replaced by the isolated, private man with limited leisure time. In order to create a more rational and progressive society, we need to alter the social and economic situations that lead to the degradation of civic engagement. To augment civic participation, we should increase the amount of active leisure time, promote social and metropolitan lifestyles, and increase the funding and support given to creative and interactive education. Fostering Enlightenment coffeehouse culture in the modern era, while difficult and by no means a perfect solution, should hopefully stimulate a more social and rational society that is inherently interested in its own progress and improvement.
Fostering Enlightenment Coffeehouse Culture in the Present
(2015-05) McComb, Sofie
Mediating a Pauline poetics : the imperial, sacred georgics of John Dyer and William Cowper
(2012-05) Wehrle, Cole Thomas; Baker, Samuel; MacDuffie, Allen
This report offers an analysis of the ways in which two eighteenth century georgic poems, John Dyer’s The Fleece and William Cowper’s The Task, mediate evangelical and imperial practices. Through an inquiry into the recent critical intersection between Kevis Goodman’s media focused research into the georgic and Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s similarly inflected inquiry into the Enlightenment, this report suggests that the didactic, agricultural musings of Dyer and Cowper betray a deep engagement the consequences of imperialism and the execution of Britain’s dawning evangelical charge.
Pregnant poetics and gestational narratives in eighteenth-century English literature
(2017-05) Gay, Lindsey Marlene Powers; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Bertelsen, Lance; Longaker, Mark; Baker, Samuel; Seaholm, Megan
In this project I examine eighteenth-century literary representations of the pregnant or birthing female body—the woman who herself straddles the line between subject and object, Self and Other, life and death—and what she signifies in the Enlightenment cultural imagination. Throughout the project, I examine how the overriding metaphors of gestation and birth inhabit the act of writing itself, as well as the structures underpinning these authors’ narrative and verse. The works I examine propose that reproductive women have a special relationship to metaphor—both in the specific representation of writing-as-birth, and the figurative function of metaphor in general. Combining affect theory, feminist psychoanalysis, medical and scientific history, and formal literary analysis, I investigate what the eighteenth century tells us about what it means to be human, and the Enlightenment encouraged us to perceive human subjectivity as intimately bound with feminine reproduction. In my first chapter, I discuss the Enlightenment’s embryological debates and the monstrous maternal imagination as they appear in The Dunciad and elsewhere in Alexander Pope’s life and works. In my second chapter, I consider how knowledge exclusive to reproductive women joins with narrative structures of concealment in Eliza Haywood’s 1720s short fiction. Her representations of pregnant women’s bodies and minds first convey, then challenge the abjection of pregnancy and parturition. My third chapter explores how Mary Wollstonecraft translates abject reproductive imagery into a affective scrutiny of the maternal mind in Maria and elsewhere. Wollstonecraft shows how the reproductive woman is susceptible to socioeconomic, material, and emotional pressures that can make her an object without agency. I end by offering an overview of representations of reproduction in agrarian and industrial environments. The authors I examine participated in the emerging science of embryology and in the gendered discourses of sensibility and sentiment. Their works demonstrate the political uses of pregnancy and birth. I participate in the ongoing critical reclamation of feminist history by probing literary representations of one of the most ostensibly appreciated—but oft-derided—times in a woman’s life: the transformative, dangerous, confusing, contradictory, metaphor-rich events of pregnancy and childbirth.
Reading Rousseau’s First Discourse through the Polemics
(2020-12-05) Sanfilippo, C. S.; Pangle, Thomas L.; Stauffer, Devin, 1970-
This report analyzes Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and the polemics Rousseau wrote in defense of that work, paying special attention to his rhetoric. In supplementing an interpretation of the First Discourse with Rousseau’s polemics, several of the paradoxes of the work are resolved. I argue that the central paradox of the work, whether Rousseau is for or against science, can be resolved: Rousseau is ultimately in favor of science but highly critical of popularized science. Since virtue is the only sound basis of civil society, and science corrupts virtue, Rousseau speaks out against science. But the life dedicated science is the source of the highest flourishing for those who are capable of it. Hence, he concludes the discourse by praising a certain kind of science that is compatible with virtue. His complex position reveals a keen awareness of the distinction between the few and the many—a distinction of the utmost importance for politics, according to Rousseau. Moreover, I analyze Rousseau’s distinct understanding of civic health and corruption and the causes of corruption. Rousseau does not argue that the sciences and arts are the original or sole causes of corruption; they can only come into being in an already corrupt society. However, they do tend to reinforce corruption and make the return to virtue all but impossible. I conclude with an analysis of what can be done in practice according to Rousseau given his bleak analysis of contemporary politics.
Undressing nature: the uncertain enlightenment and the hermeneutic ontology of the novel
(2015-12) Cowles, Lynn Aysley; Garrison, James D.; Rumrich, John; Bertelsen, Lance; Longaker, Mark; Ingrassia, Catherine
_Undressing Nature_ argues that in some of the writing produced by pioneers working in new literary generic forms at the end of the Early Modern period, the characteristics of irony, self-reflexive discourse, and the consistent examination of the fictional in relation to the real function narratively and culturally to undermine the empiricist project of totalizing knowledge that prescribed the field of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment. These characteristics, which came to be identified with the genre of the novel in subsequent centuries, refuse the determination of perfect or exact meaning within systems of signification, and they excavate the Enlightenment subject from Cartesian epistemological interiority. As they contemplated divisions between the external material world and the inner thinking mind, some Early Modern figures relied on the rhetorical tradition of figuring words or expression as the dress or clothing that brings forth human thought or nature into the world of interaction and communication. Because of the philosophical position of language or dress in between the universal and the particular, these metaphors provide fascinating examples of the philosophical nexus between literature, culture, and philosophy. By approaching the task of interpreting both words and the world with skepticism, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding scrutinized the ideological infrastructures of Enlightenment thought and reformulated contemporary understandings of knowing and being. Their ironic discourse interrogated the concept of the stable self, and in the process of doing so, these authors tested out, examined, and developed a discursive structure for meaning and interpretation that relied on the subject’s position in a networked system of identification. In such a system, being and identity are contingent upon the subject’s relationship not only with other subjects but also with material objects in the world like books and clothes. The externalizing of subjectivity removes the self from the Cartesian binary of mind and body and implicates the subject in relation to others such that identity and meaning are understood in an hermeneutic network of ontological signification. Undressing Nature argues that the discursive structure of the novel provides a venue in which theorizers of uncertainty and indeterminacy during the Enlightenment produced narratives that exhibit and reconstruct that hermeneutic ontology.
The unmaking of empire : nature and politics in the early Colombian imagination, 1808-1821
(2011-05) Afanador, Maria Jose; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Deans-Smith, Susan
In this report I argue that during the independence wars from Spain and the first decade of republican rule, the learned elite of the viceroyalty of New Granada—present day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—articulated narratives of nature and science to debates over provincial hierarchies, to justify provincial unity, foreign commercial integration, and the creation of political symbols for the new polity. In the process of undoing the Spanish empire, the lettered elite conceived of their homeland’s natural bounties as key cultural capital, and as the language with which to frame their aspirations as political community, as part of a national polity or of regional patrias. By using newspapers, constitutional debates, scientific writings, and visual evidence, I place the elite’s sensibilities and concerns about their fatherland’s nature in the wider context of political transformations that took place from 1808 and on. In the first section, I explore eighteenth-century assessments of New Granada’s nature, offering an overview of key conceptions of New Granada’s geopolitical situation and nature that shaped the Creole imagination. In the second section, I characterize the reforms brought about by the Bourbon monarchy in New Granada, giving weight to the socialization of practices of the utility of science among the learned elite. The third section illustrates how Neogranadians deployed nature in assessing provincial fragmentation, and in the debate over the preeminence of Santafé as capital when the monarchic crisis exploded. The fourth section explores how nature was employed as an argument in debates over the integration of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador into a single republic, and the adoption of a federal or a central state. Finally, section five discusses the role of New Granada’s natural landmarks in discourses of provincial and foreign commercial integration, along with a reflection on the use of nature as political symbol for the new republic. My aim is to explore the ways that the lettered elite incorporated nature into geopolitical discourses of a polity separate from Spain, and to uncover the tensions embedded in the ways they imagined their desired nation.