Humanities 4: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution
Winter 2016
Course Requirements
Antony Lyon
Email: alyon@ucsd.edu
Office Hours: Wed 10-12, or by appt @ Galbraith 184
Lecture: MWF, 1-1:50 @ Solis 107
Course Syllabus (First Day Version)
Required Texts
(*) Course Reader
- Several selections are only available on the Library's Course Reserves. Follow the link to download PDFs.
(B) Books that can be purchased from the PC Bookstore
- John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (Broadview)
- *Also available as pdf from publisher
- Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, trans T Cuffe (Penguin)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans F Philip (Oxford)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther, trans D Constantine (Oxford)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1831 Edition) (Penguin)
Course Requirements
- Section/Participation—10%
- Weekly Assignments—5%
- Paper 1—20% (Due 2/1)
- Paper 2—30% (Due 2/29)
- Final Exam—35%
- Exam Essay Questions
Students must fulfill all course requirements in order to pass the course.
Class Schedule
1/4 — Introduction: Revolutions
1/6-11 — Political Community and the Right to Resist
- (B) John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Ch 1-5, 7-9, 11, 14, 18-19
1/13 — Dissolving the Political Bands
- (*) The Declaration of Independence
- (*) Optional: Draft Comparison (Course Reserves)
1/15-20 — The Best of All Possible Worlds
- (B) Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, p1-94
- (*) Optional: Voltaire, "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster"
- Monday, 1/18: No Class—Martin Luther King Day
1/22-27 — Being Human
- (B) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, p14-85, look over the end notes (p86-120)
1/29-2/3 — On Respect—The Morality of Reason
- (*) Immanuel Kant, Selections from The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (Course Reserves)
2/5-10 — The Romantic Hero
- (B) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, p1-112
2/12-19 — Humanity, the Creator
- (B) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, p15-225
- Monday, 2/15: No Class—Presidents' Day
2/22 & 29 — Self-Reliance: An American Romanticism
- (*) Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Divinity School Address" and "Self-Reliance"
2/24 & 26 — Canceled
3/2 — American Slavery and Music
- (*) Selected Songs, Lyrics and Spotify Playlist
3/4 — The Quiet American
- (*) Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
3/7-11 — Democratic Vistas
- (*) Walt Whitman, Selections from Leaves of Grass
- (*) Whitman Supplement for 3/7
3/18 — Final Exam: Friday, 11:30-2:30
Complementary Course Materials
Voltaire's Candide
- Optimism as Moral Irresponsibility: Charles Homan, "On How the 'Perfect Storm' Became the Perfect Cop-Out," New York Times, January 20, 2016
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Rousseau's Anthropology today: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Documentary, part 1 of 18) (Amazon)
- Rousseau and Modern Life: "First Theatre, Then Facebook," by Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott, New York Times op-ed, June 16, 2012
Enlightenment & Progress
- Practical social progress: Hans Rosling's "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes" from The Joy of Stats on BBC4
- Recent arguments for moral progress, see Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Amazon) and Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Amazon)
Immanuel Kant
- Kenneth Rexroth, August 23, 1964
- There were several questions in class that touched on altruism and how that fits with Kant. Here's an op-ed reflecting on why altruism is such a difficult issue for us morally and philosophically. David Brooks, "A Question of Moral Radicalism," New York Times, February 5, 2016
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
- On the Summer of 1816. "The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster," Gillen D'arcy Wood on Nautilus
- On Polidori's "The Vampyre": "The Poet, the Physician, and the Birth of the Modern Vampire," Andrew McConnell Stott on The Public Domain Review
If you love great literature
- You should read Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" even though the lecture on it has been canceled.
Slave Songs
- On the origins of African-American music: LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Amazon) and a selection about a slaves' church service
- Recent book on the Underground Railroad: Eric Foner, Gateway to Heaven: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (Amazon)
- Photography essay on the Underground Railroad: Through Darkness to Light by Jeanine Michna-Bales. Review from Feature Shoot.
- Collection of American religious recordings from early 20th century: Goodbye, Babylon. And if you like the beautiful, nearly-forgotten past of recorded music, check out Dust to Digital's website. They put together incredible collections.
- Wikipedia page on Nat Turner's Rebellion to get the basics
Emily Dickinson
- Emily Dickinson Archive has images of the original manuscripts
Whitman Readings
- "Spontaneous Me": Pablo Neruda's "X"
Additional Information
Academic Integrity Policy
The UCSD Policy on Integrity of Scholarship must be observed for this course. Examples of plagiarism include, but are not limited to the following: turning in another student’s paper as if it was your own; collaboration with another student in writing the paper; quoting, paraphrasing, or borrowing ideas from published or unpublished material written by someone other than yourself, without specific acknowledgment of the source. In the Humanities Program, you are to write papers entirely on your own study of the assigned materials, NOT on secondary sources of any kind.
Students agree that by taking this course all required essays will be subject to text-similarity review on Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted essays will be included as source documents in the turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of essays. Use of turnitin.com is subject to the terms of use agreement posted on its website.
Additional Information
If you need accommodation for disability or religious reasons, please see me as soon as possible so that the appropriate arrangements can be made.
For information about Revelle College’s Humanities Program, including help with writing, administrative information, and schedules, please visit the program’s website.