Pleasure in the 18th C

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This interdisciplinary course will examine the theme of pleasure in eighteenth-century French literature and art. We will analyze the uses of pleasure in texts by Rousseau, Voltaire, Marivaux, and Prevost as well as in paintings by Watteau and Fragonard. Through our readings and visual analyses, we will interrogate the role that pleasure played for some of the most important cultural figures in eighteenth-century France, and we will discuss such themes as intellectual pleasure, philosophical pleasure, courtly privilege and pleasures, and all pleasures sensual and textual. Our discussions will also lead us to formulate questions about 18th-century ideas of gender, class, and identity in the Ancien R?gime, and their importance for our own time. This course fulfills the upper-division pre-1800 literature requirement for the French major.