Browsing by Subject "Enlightenment"
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Item Autodidacts: Eighteenth-Century Progress Narratives and the Limits of Enlightenments(2023-05) Choudhury, MoinakThis project describes how eighteenth-century progress narratives conceived the autodidact as an antagonist. Before the nineteenth century transformed it into an emblem of self-reliance, it was a reminder of the perils of undisciplined learning. This errant character diverged from literary experiments with liberal individualism to highlight its anxieties about self-governance. In this regard, I suggest that the autodidact was a marginal figure at two junctures in the eighteenth century: hierarchies of position—the metropole and the periphery; and debates on scientific methods of inquiry. These two critical approaches, I propose, will expand autodidacticism's literary history and contribute to eighteenth-century and postcolonial studies.Item Disenchantment and Re-enchantment: Rhetorical Tension in the Siècle des Lumières(2020-12) Killackey, SeanRife with knowledge projects, encyclopedia-writing, botanical books, travel accounts, and other writing that we today would call ‘scientific,’ the eighteenth century is marked by an explosion of empiricism and rational materialism, re-shaping epistemological frameworks for understanding the natural world — recording and distributing this through a variety of texts that sit uneasily astride our modern disciplinary and genre boundaries.Through studies of several eighteenth-century French texts and their engraved illustrations, this dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies to critique, disrupt, and re-shape thought about the natural world in the French Siècle des Lumières. Through close reading of text and image, we explore how many texts of the French Enlightenment function through opposing rhetorical strategies whose resolution relied on figural thinking. Informed by the work on figural and literal discourse of Jean-François Lyotard and Norman Bryson, this dissertation examines rhetorical oppositionality in texts that make an explicit claim to knowledge work and their trajectories into novels and other texts that make no such explicit claim. I argue that these texts mobilize incompatible rhetorical strategies to critique, disrupt, and reform epistemological frameworks through figural thinking. Building on the work of other cultural historians, this dissertation seeks to interrogate the manner in which the texts studied reflect and respond to the epistemological anxieties of the eighteenth century. Analyzing the images and texts in works including Buffon and Daubenton’s Histoire naturelle, Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie and Études de la nature, Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes, and Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse through the lens of disenchantment and re-enchantment (as formulated by Max Weber and elaborated by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler), Rhetorical Tension in the Siècle des Lumières examines the ways that French writers of the eighteenth century sought to shear away supernatural or traditional authority for knowledge to instead ground understanding of the natural world in empirical observation through rhetorical tension that elicits resolution beyond the realm of literal language, in the between and beyond of figural thinking.Item Enlightened institutions: science, plantations, and slavery.(2012-08) Otremba, EricMy project examines confluences between the scientific, progressive, and reforming ideas associated with the early English Enlightenment, and the concurrent proliferation of Caribbean slave plantations. More specifically, it argues that Britain’s West Indian sugar estates were major sites of early Enlightenment thought and practice, and were imagined as such by both Caribbean planters and English reformers during this period. From the mid-seventeenth century until the American Revolution, two of the most significant developments within the English Atlantic were the proliferation of Enlightenment ideas on reason, order, and progress, and the simultaneous expansion of slave-based work regimes. Yet despite this concurrence historians have almost always treated these topics separately, juxtaposing them as opposing forces within early modern thought. This approach has stymied historians when seeking to explain how a terror-based, exploitative labor system could prosper during the period of Enlightenment. Such a problem has forced historians either to ignore slavery’s role within Enlightenment narratives, or to characterize slavery as the Enlightenment’s shadow-double with expressions like “The Peculiar Institution” or “The American Paradox.” I address this problem through a study of early English sugar plantations, showing how these estates were appraised by England’s intellectual community in the seventeenth century. In doing so, I demonstrate how both slavery and the Enlightenment shared common roots within the expansionist discourse of English natural science during this period. Within this discourse, the dual categories of knowing and dominating were understood as positive synergic outcomes of an ethos which stressed both a systematic exploration of knowledge, and an enforced rational application of that knowledge towards various worldly problems. In particular, this ethos advocated using new discoveries and innovations to streamline artisanal industries and to more thoroughly organize English labor routines, all for the sake of national plenty and profit. Because of this focus, natural scientists of this period perceived little moral, scientific, or economic distinction between the coercive practices of the West Indies and other developmental or experimental projects within British dominions. Instead, Caribbean plantations were simply understood as another example of this period’s strivings towards moral, natural, and economic improvement—hallmarks of early Enlightenment thought.Item 'In an age so enlightened, enthusiasm so extravagant': popular religion in Enlightenment Scotland, 1712-1791"(2009-05) Brekke, Luke G.This dissertation draws on printed and manuscript sources to provide a detailed look at parish life in the west of Scotland during the eighteenth century, examining how this society moved from Reformation to Enlightenment at the local level. It argues that religious culture in this region around 1700 is not best characterized in terms of "official religion" and "popular religion," but rather as a "folk Calvinism" substantially shared by clergy and laity and by elites and the very humble. This folk Calvinism came under increasing challenge from a new worldview related to emerging Enlightenment thought in the metropole and to a new theology among the clerical avant-garde in the international Reformed world. From a religious culture all but universally shared in this region, "folk Calvinism" became a provincial culture which opposed the new, cosmopolitan religious culture of lay and clerical elites oriented toward England, Europe, and the republic of letters. The two religious cultures clashed dramatically in the so-called "violent settlements" of the 1760s-80s, when cosmopolitan gentry sought to impose enlightened pastors on the parishes, and were resisted by an organized and surprisingly articulate campaign of petitioning, theological critique, non-compliance, and even rioting by parish traditionalists. These events were followed by the formation of competing churches (many vibrantly evangelical) and the erosion of the universal discipline for which Calvinism has been notorious, creating a society where many individuals were zealously and traditionally devout, but no one religious culture held a position of hegemony. Century's end in the west of Scotland saw the emergence of plebeian anti-Calvinists like John Goldie and Robert Burns--a striking change from what earlier appeared the strong correlation between enlightened religion and elite social status--but a sizable and passionate minority of "enthusiastic," traditionalist Christians continued to flourish. The paper argues that modernity means not particular substantive views (e.g., optimism about human nature, trust in unaided reason), but rather this resulting condition of plurality, the inability of any one worldview to achieve the kind of hegemony held before these events by Calvinism.Item Modernity and ethics: the ghost of terror in French thought.(2010-08) Reinberg, Mira"Modernity and Ethics" examines the different incarnations of terror in literary and philosophical works, as well as in film, in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I follow texts engaged in thinking the dialectic between Enlightenment and violence and which had critical influence on French and Francophone thought in particular and contemporary global thought in general. Three principal questions emerge from my reading of these works: First, in light of the turbulent post-colonial reality in North Africa and France, as well as the Middle East, are there unique historical moments that call for a state of exception in which the law is suspended for raison d'Etat, or does ethics demand a rethinking of insurrection? Second, how do the positions which these writers take toward the understanding of violence shift the ideological frameworks that articulate or contest the conceptualization of terror? And third, what are the ethical stakes in the intersection of art and resistance? In works by Genet and films by Godard which confront the question of revolution I trace an ethics of resistance that is grounded more in the artistic interpretation of lived conflicts than in political endorsement or condemnation of violence. I analyze the notion of the gaze in Genet's work, and of time in films by Godard. I examine the continuing dialogue of modern thinkers such as Marx, Arendt, Benjamin, and Lyotard with the ethics of universalism founded by Enlightenment thought. The tension of this dialogue is exemplified in Hegel's conceptualization of the Reign of Terror as the logical consequence of an ideological philosophy. Modernity is haunted by the relationship between two seemingly incompatible phenomena: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and terror. The philosophical debate illuminates crucial questions that indicate the difficulty in articulating a viable understanding of modern conflicts. With a reading of Lacan's essay "Kant avec Sade," in which psychoanalysis confronts (Kant's) moral categories with Sade's literary formulation of "happiness in evil," I analyze the discourse of evil in a 19th-century short story by Villiers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary text provides important insights into the understanding of categorical ethical formulations.Item Sensible Mathematics: The Science of Music in the Age of the Baroque(2019-12) Fix, AdamIn this dissertation I analyze the relations between mathematics, music theory, and experimental sciences from the scientific revolution through the Enlightenment. Music in the early modern period was seen as a mathematical science. More so than other branches of mathematics, music also had a direct connection to human sensory perception. I show that music, interpreted as a kind of “sensible mathematics,” played a crucial though largely underappreciated role in uniting mathematical and empirical European scientific traditions. I describe the upheavals that saw music theory become unmoored and drift away from what came to be known as modern science. During the Enlightenment it landed in the domain of fine arts and aesthetics, a separation we typically see as self-evident today. By elucidating the role of music in the scientific revolution and its aftermath, while emphasizing the shift from premodern musical science to modern physico-mathematical acoustics, I reveal the profound—even paradoxical—tensions between science and the practical arts.