Fictions of Enlightenment (Level 6)

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Ann Lewis
• Assessment: an in-class test (40%) and a 2500-word essay (60%)

This module brings together a selection of literary and philosophical texts by the best known Enlightenment thinkers, in a range of different genres (the conte, the novel, the essay, the theatre). We will examine these texts’ fictional portrayal of the passage from ignorance to knowledge - through various types of journey of discovery and stories of human development (whether of an individual or the species), and fictional experiments. These provide us with a range of perspectives on what ‘Enlightenment’ might mean, dramatising the limits of human knowledge and understanding, and exploring a range of key philosophical issues and debates along the way. These include, for example, the origins of social inequality, the nature of power relations between the sexes and between masters vs servants, and the question of whether human beings have free will.

• Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste (1784)
• Marivaux, La Dispute (1744)
• Riccoboni, Histoire d’Ernestine (1765)
• Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750)
• Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755)
• Voltaire, Candide (1759)