Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 221/222

Modern European Humanities

Fall 2023 Syllabus

Books

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Penguin Classics)
James, The Black Jacobins (Vintage)
Kant, Basic Writings (Modern Library)
Lessing, Nathan the Wise (Bedford)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (Modern Library)
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader (Norton)
Popkin, Jeremy D. A Short History of the French Revolution (Prentice-Hall)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Univ. of Chicago)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, ed. Butler (Oxford)
Smith, Adam. The Essential Adam Smith (‎W. W. Norton & Company)
Voltaire. Candide (Bedford)
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin)

Schedule

Note on Lectures: All lectures will be recorded and available online (links below). There will be no live lectures this Fall.

Week 1 (Aug. 28 - Sept. 1)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, August 28: “Beginning the Conversations” / Jay Dickson.
  • Reading:
    • Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (ed. John Ricchetti) 5-108; 122-37; 154-79; 219-24; 238-41.
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, August 30: “Free Candide!” / Hugh Hochman
  • Reading:
    • Voltaire, Candide
  • Lecture: Friday, September 1: “How to be a Modern Human?” / Benjamin Lazier
  • Reading:
    • Lessing, Nathan the Wise

Week 2 (Sept. 4 - Sept. 8)

Conference 1
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday September 6: “The Very Image of Technology (Diderot and the Encyclopédie Plates)” /  Kris Cohen
  • Reading:

Week 3 (Sept. 11 - Sept. 15)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday September 11: “Economics and Sentiment” / Maureen Harkin
  • Reading:
    • Smith, Adam, The Essential Adam Smith. Selections, pp. 64-88, 100-104, 133-36, 143-147; 158-175, 248-258, 264-267, 293-294, 302-307, 321-324 
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, September 13: “What’s Neo about Liberalism” / Benjamin Lazier
  • Reading:
    • Smith, Adam, The Essential Adam Smith. Selections, pp. 64-88, 100-104, 133-36, 143-147; 158-175, 248-258, 264-267, 293-294, 302-307, 321-324

Week 4 (Sept. 18 - 22)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, September 18: “Rousseau and Narrative Genealogy” / Luc Monnin
  • Reading:
    • Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau [instructor selections].
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, September 20: “Rousseau and the Politics of Being-with-Others” / Benjamin Lazier
  • Reading:
    • Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau [instructor selections]. 

Week 5 (Sept. 25 - 29)

Conference 1
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, September 27: “‘The Inhuman Traffic': Atlantic Slavery and the Making of Europe” / Radhika Natarajan"
  • Reading:
    • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, Chs 1, 2, 4-7, 9, 11-12. 
    • Equiano, Image gallery 

Week 6 (Oct. 2 - Oct. 6)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, October 2: Equiano and the Legacies of British Abolition" / Radhika Natarajan
  • Reading:
    • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, Chs 1, 2, 4-7, 9, 11-12.
    • Equiano, image gallery
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, October 4: “Becoming a Revolutionary” / Mary Ashburn Miller
  • Reading:
    • Abbe Sieyes, “What is the Third Estate?” (e-reserve)
    • Declaration of the Rights of Man & Citizen (e-reserve)
    • Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution chapters 1-3

Week 7 (Oct. 9 - 13)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, October 9: “This is Not My Beautiful Revolution” / Mary Ashburn Miller
  • Reading:
    • Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution, Chapters 4-6
    • Robespierre, "On Political Morality" (link)
    • Robespierre, "Report on Religious and Moral Ideas and Republican Principles" (e-reserves)   
    • “The Revolutionary Calendar" (e-reserve)
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, October 11: "Koupe tèt, brule kay: Black Liberation and the Legacies of the Haitian Revolution" / Jeannine Murray-Román
  • Reading:
    • C. L. R James The Black Jacobins p. 1-61 (Prologue, Preface, Chapters 1 and 2)
    • L'Acte de l'Indépendance de la République d'Haïti (link) (PDF of original document) 

FALL BREAK OCTOBER 14-22

Week 8 (Oct. 23 - Oct. 27)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, October 23: “To Preserve the Constitution: France, India, and Edmund Burke's Conservatism” /  Radhika Natarajan 
  • Reading:
    • Edmund Burke, selections from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (e-reserve)
    • Edmund Burke, selection from “Speech on Fox’s India Bill” (e-reserve)
    • Edmund Burke, selections from Reflections on the Revolution in France (e-reserve)
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, October 25: “Posing the Woman Question” / Jay Dickson
  • Reading:
    • Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Recommended selection: author's introduction, Author’s Dedication (3-7); Author’s Introduction (11-16) Chs. 1-3, (19-67), Ch 9 (175-86).
    • William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) (e-reserve)
    • Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) (e-reserve)
    • Olympe de Gouges, "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" (link) 

Week 9 (Oct. 30 - Nov. 3)

Conference 1
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, November 1: “On the Subject of Wordsworth” / Hugh Hochman
  • Reading:
    • Wordsworth, Major Works. "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"; "The Old Cumberland Beggar"; "Michael"; "Ode ('There was a time')" [also called "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"]; "Lines Written in Early Spring;" (e-reserve)

Week 10 (Nov. 6 - Nov. 10)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, November 6: “The Colonial Imaginary” /  Kris Cohen
  • Reading:
    • Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “‘Whose Colour Was Not Black nor White nor Grey, But an Extraneous Mixture, Which No Pen Can Trace, Although Perhaps the Pencil May’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios.” Art History 22, no. 5 (1999): 676–704. [Content Warning: mention of depicted rape on p. 683-4; no graphic descriptions. Illustration of racial caricature, p. 692] (e-reserve) 
Conference 2

Week 11 (Nov. 13 - Nov. 17)

Conference 1
Conference 2
  • Wednesday, November 15: No lecture

Week 12 (Nov. 20 - Nov. 24)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, November 20: 
  • Reading:
    • E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class [suggested pages: 9-13, 189-212, 314-374, 711-746] (e-reserves)
    • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [selections] (e-reserves)
Conference 2
  • Wednesday, November 22: No lecture

  

THANKSGIVING BREAK - November 23-26


Week 13 (Nov. 27 - Dec. 1)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: Monday, November 27: “Marxian Thought” / Peter Steinberger
  • Reading:
    • Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, Instructor Selections. (Recommended Readings: The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology)
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Wednesday, November 20: “Man the Maker” / Mary Ashburn Miller
  • Reading:
    • Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, Instructor Selections. (Recommended Readings: The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology)

Week 14 (Dec. 4 - 6)

Conference 1
Conference 2
  • Wednesday, December 6 (Last Day of Classes): No lecture

Course outcomes

Hum 220 is a course that can be used to satisfy Group I or Group II requirements. After completing the course students will be better able to:

  • Understand how language or other modes of expression (symbols, images, sounds, etc.) work , make an argument, present a vision, convey a feeling, and/or convey an idea;
  • Analyze and interpret a text, whether a literary or philosophical text, or a work of the visual or performing arts;
  • Evaluate arguments about texts;
  • Analyze social, political or economic institutions, cultural formations, languages, structures, and/or processes;
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social change and/or the relationship between individual and society; 
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.