Course Description
CIVILIZATION: From its earliest common use, the term “civilization” has been used to differentiate Western culture from “barbarity”, implying inherent Western cultural superiority to other cultures and people. This course focuses on the Literature of Western Civilization from the early 18th century on, a time when Western political, economic and religious powers colonized much of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and Western civilization worked hard to “civilize” those “barbaric” worlds.
In many ways, the literature of this era both reflects and challenges this civilizing effort. Along with other dominant Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, Modernist and Post Modernist themes, we will explore the complex relationships between civilization and literature, civilization and the individual, and Western civilization’s confrontation with those cultures and individuals it attempted to “civilize”. We will explore how key writers struggled to understand, define and reshape our conceptions of the individual in relation to society, Western civilization in relation to other cultures, and the very definitions of concepts “man”, “woman” "rights", "freedom", "truth", "morality" and “justice”.
Our focus on these concepts will serve as an inroad into a deeper understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the individual and society, philosophy, law, imperialism, economics, history and literature.
Rubric
Our task as readers is to:
1) Understand the philosophical, cultural and political concepts represented in each text, especially in relation to concepts of “civilization”, "the individual in relation to "society", “man”, “woman” "rights", "freedom", "truth", "morality" and “justice”.
2) Understand each of the texts in relation to one another.
3) Understand the relationship of the texts to their respective aesthetic, historical, cultural and political contexts.
4) Understand how these specific texts – and the ideas they represent – have influenced and shaped current Western culture – current philosophical, cultural and political beliefs, assumptions, etc. concerning concepts of "civilization", "the individual in relation to society" and so on.
5) Analyze and evaluate the positions forwarded in each text in relation to our own personal and civic lives – our own philosophical, cultural and political beliefs, assumptions, etc. concerning concepts of "civilization", "the individual in relation to society" and so on.
Basically, our task is to better understand the worldviews that created these texts, better understand the world the texts created and, most importantly, better understand our own worldviews in relationship to the texts and the worldviews that created them.