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43358
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Lecture-Discussion
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P
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11:00AM
-12:50PM
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T
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113 English Building
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Nazar, H
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 01/19/16-05/04/16
- Section Title:
- Rousseau, Feminism, & Romantic
- Section Info:
- Topic Section P: Rousseau, Feminism, and Romanticism The two decades following the French revolution of 1789 were a period of remarkable intellectual ferment and ideological contestation in Britain. The “pamphlet war” begun by Edmund Burke’s dyspeptic denunciation of the revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and continued in such rejoinders to Burke as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-92), powerfully established the contours of present-day liberalism and conservatism. This seminar brings into focus one of the most far-reaching developments of the 1790s and early 1800s: the emergent feminist discourse of the “rights of woman,” which accompanied the more prominent one of the “rights of man,” and which was developed, in important ways, through the medium of fiction rather than by political or philosophical treatises. More particularly, the seminar considers how a broad spectrum of Romantic women writers engaged questions about women’s rights and duties by engaging the maddeningly paradoxical but fascinating mid-century writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, hailed by the French revolutionaries as a primary intellectual influence on the revolution. Rousseau’s bestselling sentimental novel, Julie or The New Heloise (1761), was especially important to women writers of the later eighteenth century: it was cited/revised/contested in multiple novels by century’s end, including Helen Maria Williams’s Julia (1790), Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1795), Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher (1798), Jane West’s Tale of the Times (1799), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). We will ask how Rousseau’s claims about female education, sensibility, natural rights, and freedom—as developed in writings including Julie, The Social Contract, and Emile (all three published in 1761-62)—served as a springboard for the Romantic novel and late-century feminism. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of Jane Austen’s outrageously funny juvenilia (written in the 1790s), as well as the more sober Sense and Sensibility (published in 1811 but drafted in the 1790s as an epistolary novel à la Julie), which represent a culmination of post-revolutionary debates about women and their rights. This seminar is designed to appeal not only to students of the long eighteenth century or of women’s writing but also to anyone interested in the Enlightenment origins of the dominant ideologies of our own time. Rousseau has proven to be one of the most influential figures in the development, at once, of present-day liberalism and totalitarianism. His many paradoxical self-descriptions— philosophe and harbinger of the counter-Enlightenment, contractarian and sentimentalist, “solitary walker” and “proud citizen of Geneva”—have consistently created the strangest of bedfellows amongst his admirers. His writings were also crucial to the development of theory in our profession, serving as a springboard for the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, among others. Romantic women writers’ response to Rousseau, therefore, began a trend that continues unabated today and that has critical consequences for the future discourses of modernity.
- Restriction(s):
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Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
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