English 248 - Fall, 2011

18th Century Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Loar, Christopher
CRN: 83751
Time: W 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later British

Description

Life, Literature, and Machines in the Long Eighteenth Century

This seminar will explore the relationship between living things and machinery in, roughly, the century after Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes famously presents an elaborately mechanical analysis of the human mind and the state-machine that must govern it. Equally famously, the 1660s see the emergence of a form of natural inquiry that can be properly called materialist—an inquiry that depends from the outset on elaborate mechanical manipulations of the natural world. This doubled presence of mechanism—of an epistemological dependence on machines as well a modeling of life and cognition on the movements of machinery—importantly shaped developments in other fields of knowledge, including, of course, what we now call “literature,” itself made increasingly available through the machinery of the printing press. However, both technological development and mechanistic discussions of life met continual resistance from critics who frequently had recourse to categories of “life,” spirit, or the vital as antidotes or supplements to the mechanical. Beginning with Restoration-era explorations of machinery and materialism, this seminar will trace enthusiasm for the machine and living mechanisms alongside skeptical and satiric treatments of the same, including a detailed study of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the century’s most elaborate inquiry into the unstable relationship between life and mechanism.

Grading

Based on class discussion, presentations, and a seminar paper.

Texts

Leviathan, Hobbes
, Course reader containing additional materials
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke
Selected poetry, Rochester
Frankenstein, Shelley
The Dunciad, Pope
Love in Excess, Haywood
Tristram Shandy, Sterne
Tale of a Tub, Swift
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke