Voices of Dissent: Enlightenment Principle and Social Protest

3 units

The eighteenth century saw a rise in overtly moralizing texts, on the one hand, and unapologetically immoralist philosophies on the other. We focus on texts that avoid these extremes, allowing multiple voices to be heard. With the aid of excerpts from Genette, Bakhtine, Todorov, and Barthes, we identify the voices of dissent in several eighteenth-century genres, including satire, the tale, the novella, the philosophical dialogue, theater, autobiography, and the epistolary novel. By reading authors such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Prévost, Diderot, Cazotte, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, and Charrière, students come to appreciate a third tendency in eighteenth-century texts that is crucial to our understanding of the Enlightenment: the tendency to validate conflicting perspectives. We consider whether a moral can be derived from a text that consistently questions the voice of authority. We analyze the implications of such questioning in the years before the Revolution. Finally, we consider the extent to which the overzealous censorship laws of the period may have obliged authors to couch socially controversial ideas in narrative forms that seem to deny their own assertions. Prereq: Fr 325 and Fr 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent WU transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One hour preceptorial required for undergraduates.