Read on before you answer!
On the first day of class people identified a number of concepts that they correctly associated with the Enlightenment:
- doubt and skepticism about religion
- new ideas about equality among people
- distrust of monarchical and authoritarian forms of government
- exploration
- the development of empirical, scientific thought
- emphasis on reason
So, you've now read literature from that era that spans the globe, as well as the wide range of functions literature can serve, from advancing new ideas, to supplying entertainment, to repackaging old certainties in new ways, to validating the realities of readers' lives. You've done some archival research of your own, and in the company of your classmates you've explored the time period largely unconstrained by national boundaries or by preconceived ideas of what "Enlightenment" literature ought to be (after all, the word appears nowhere in the title of your Longman anthology).
What have you learned from the reading for this course? Identify ONE specific thing that you now know that you didn't on the first day of class. If a classmate has already responded with the thing you wanted to say, identify something else that you have learned.
Deadline:
14 comments:
I think the thing I learned the most about was the role of women in the Enlightenment texts we read. Women and their actions played a constant role in the stories we covered and I was really surprised actually. Maybe I'm just not as history savvy as I should be, but the portrayal of their sexual desires throughout this course really opened my eyes to a world I thought was much more recent for female characteristics. I find it interesting how involved a lot of these authors were in this topic and how they so publicly talked about it in their writings.
What I really learned from this class is not something that was what we were specifically required to learn or even the intention of this course; I learned how someone in the field of English/Literature analyzes a text. I took this class as a literature/arts requirement and I thought it would be useful because I'm studying to be a history teacher. I wanted to read a large body of primary sources that I could perhaps one day integrate into a class while teaching about the Enlightenment. I did gain some valuable sources, but also unexpectedly learned that English majors/literary scholars look at texts very differently than an historian. In a history class, you generally look over many many primary sources in order to reconstruct your own vision of history, what happened, and come to conclusions about the consequences of an event or person or cultural shift, etc. In this class, however, we focused more on texts in and of themselves; we did often discuss wider implications in a historical setting, but it felt secondary and the primary focus seemed to be its value just as literature. I think it's interesting to learn that an English class is very different from a history class in ways I did not expect at all and I think this will be very valuable to me in the future. I will likely have students who wish to study English or be English teachers and I think I'll be able to better inform them and advise them on what path they might enjoy or benefit from the most. I've also become more aware of how I, as a historian, initially and almost instinctively look at sources through contrasting it with what we've been doing in class which has kind of forced me to look at a text in a way I really haven't before.
One new thing that I learned about the Enlightenment time period during this course, was that prostitutes existed. This relates to Chad’s comment about learning about women’s roles during this time period. I never predicted women to act seductive and promiscuous in the 17thcentury. Needless to say, I was shocked! Since Fantomina was the first text that we analyzed, I discovered this fact early on in the course, but it was reiterated throughout other stories as well such as The Love Suicides at Amijima.
I learned of a whole new literary genre through our reading of the Love Suicides at Amijima. My knowledge and choices of literature have always been pretty uniformly Eurocentric and it was a nice change of pace to have exposure to eighteenth century works from other parts of the world.
Although I was not in class on the first day there is one thing that I learned from taking this Enlightenment class was what people thought of foreigners. Foreigners who came from different countries seem to be considered exotic and bring new ideas forth that may have vastly differed those of the western civilization. This new mentality offered something that had never been seen, but could serve as a model for things to be done in. They also presented a new side of what could be done that had never been thought of before. Such as an example would be in the way that all of the Hyouhynyms brought a new idea of how family systems were suppose to work and who were the inferior and superior creatures. There seems to have been more freedom granted to the writers to express a different way to interpret the same situation while using these nonwestern settings to have as their supporting argument.
I feel like this is somewhat ignorant of me, but I never realized how pervasive the theme of sexuality is throughout the centuries. It is constantly touched on today, but it was also a hot topic in the majority of this writings, from a time when I believed things would probably be more conservative and proper. On the contrary, because of the underdeveloped moral and lak of rights for women, sexuality was even more intense, with people being forced into marriage or prostitution, women being casually raped, or individuals pursuing one another incognito. Such a theme is pretty constant throughout the times considering what a basic drive it is, despite the criticism and repression of the church upon sexual expression.
I learned that many people wrote about places they never got the chance to visit. I thought it was kind of humerous how some writters took other writters' ideas and tried to make them thier own and make it seem like they went to the forign places and experienced the different culture. I always wondered how writters, such as Diderot, might have changed their stories if they had actually gone to the foriegn lands.
On a lighter note, one thing that I learned after taking this class was how obscene Gulliver's Tales is. I guess I never read the text before this class, but I did not expect to find references to scatology and masturbation in this well-known tale.
I think the participation of people in the mass circulation of texts such as the Spectator series is something that I had known about but never was afforded the opportunity to examine how closely those observations that are written down resemble our own forms of social media and blogs. It's really cool to see similarities in literary forms that span across three centuries.
Comparing where I am now to my first day in class I have learned a great deal of information about the Enlightenment era. One thing that stood out to me was the way that Wheatley's poems were circulated and the way that someone else to the initiative to print her work for her. Even printing or drawing a picture of a well educated slave on the cover. That was interesting because of the specific situation. The people in the community knew of her educaton and also appreciated or acknowledged her skills. They even promtoed it. As we seen in the reading, there was so many different people that confirmed her work as good and gave their signature.
Well, one of the things I learned from this course is that there was this guy, whose last name was Kant, who defined "Enlightenment" as the ability to think and reason independently. I thought this was very enlightening(?) in what it implies. You can see today that a lot of people are not "enlightened." What these dull folk believe is from various forms of mass media. Even in like the scientific community today, you could argue that engineers (not that I have anything against engineers) are not as enlightened as pure scientists in that they blindly apply the laws that the scientists develop.
With this in mind, although the proportion of Enlightened people to non-Enlightened may not have changed much, I believe that the Enlightenment is not so much about more people becoming Enlightened but about enlightened people becoming brave enough the belief structures that had for so long been unchallenged, whether it be religion or human nature or whatever.
So we all know the Enlightenment Era as one that emphasized reason so I was surprised by the subjectivity and sympathy seen in some of the works, especially the travel narratives like Oronooko and Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters. I guess I expected an enlightenment writer to come off as more aloof or cold-hearted (aka rational).
My initial understanding of the Enlightenment era has been distorted after months of analyzing, discussing and reading text from this period. I was unaware of such text like Spectator, that really are similar to our social structure of expressing ourselves through the media by blogging or tweeting. I think the most important thing, I will take from this class is the way women are depicted during this period and relating it to how they are depicted in the 21st century. The role of women and their behavior during the Enlightenment period was totally opposite of what I thought before this semester. For example, in Fantomina, Eloisa to Abelard, and Turkish Embassy Letters all represented a different aspect that intrigued me about women and their actions. Sexual desire was a reoccurring theme throughout a majority of the text we covered this semester. I also found it funny that there were writers that enjoyed writing travel narratives about places they never had the chance to explore. The foreign land and the experience of acquiring knowledge about these places seemed to be the objective for the writers to attract the attention of their readers.
I think one of the things I found most interesting was just what the boundaries of enlightenment thought were. I think that when taught in very basic history classes, it is easy for students to pick up on the fact that this Era was the basis of the abolition movement, feminist movement etc etc. I think what many students don't catch is the fact that the Enlightenment only formed the base of these movements and was in fact rather limited in scope in the 18th century. I was surprised to find just how cautious many writers were in expressing "radical" views like equality for women and freedom for slaves. I think this course really helped to bring out the fact that yes, many of the ideas of these later movements came out of the enlightenment, but actual enlightenment thinkers rarely took their ideals to what we would consider their logical ends, and in fact might have been quite shocked to see the "radical" responses many people of later ages had to their writings. I thought this was especially poignant when we looked at Candide in terms of various color coded stages. I initially read this book for a history class and we discussed him in relation to feminism as a proto-feminist. We never really discussed the limitations of his views on women though. The "coding" of feminist viewpoints really helped. Considering Voltaire more of a Code yellow/Orange as opposed to Red/Purple really helped to see the limitations of some of the greatest Enlightenment thinks. At the same time, I still very much give them their due because it is possible that without their thoughts the freedoms and equality we have now might have taken far longer to obtain. They were a stepping stone, but not the end game we sometimes make them out to be.
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