COML 4015 - Passion and Literary Enlightenment

(HB) (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

Limited to 15 students. Core Course for COML Majors.

N. Saccamano.

This course will consider the essential role of the passions in views of human nature and society primarily in the 18th century, and will examine how the priority given to life, the body, and acquisitive and sexual drives subverted traditional ethics and produced “sentimentality” as a reaction. Through readings of novels and some moral and political philosophy (Montaigne, Cavendish, Hobbes, Cleland, LaMettrie, Laclos, Rousseau, Nietzsche), we will discuss such topics as: the “savage” and the “state of nature” in genealogies of moral and political development; the “sexual contract,” civil society, and the family as a political-economic institution; love and sympathy in relation to law and obligation; pornography and sentimental-sexual education; tragedy, suffering, and ethical community. We will also read theoretical work by Althusser, Foucault, Butler, and Zizek to address narrative form (especially fictional autobiography and epistolary novels) and mechanisms of identity formation.