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46745
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Online
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R
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3:30PM
-5:50PM
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R
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n.a.
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Nazar, H
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 08/23/21-12/08/21
- Section Info:
- English 527 - Topic: “The Pursuit of True and Solid Happiness: Hedonism and Virtue in Enlightenment Letters” As recent scholarship on the eighteenth century recognizes, the concept of happiness acquired a new centrality in Enlightenment letters, culminating in the “greatest happiness principle” of Benthamite utilitarianism. The period saw a massive revival of Epicurean and other ancient philosophies dedicated to understanding this-worldly happiness and it spearheaded a new materialism identifying individuals as embodied persons whose reason is readily overcome by the motives of sensuous and sensual gratification. While most moralists of the period sought to distance themselves from the purported atheism and materialism of Thomas Hobbes’s groundbreaking Leviathan (1651), many appeared to accept the “Hobbist” assumption of motivational hedonism: the idea that the will is determined, above all, by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This seminar considers how this assumption plays out in a variety of literary and non-literary writings of the period. It takes its title, “the pursuit of true and solid happiness,” from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)—a phrase echoed famously by the US Declaration of Independence (1776)—in which Locke sought to revise Hobbes’s conclusion that hedonism, at the level of the individual, can be curbed only by absolutism, at the level of the state. Locke’s Essay and related writings such as Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) suggest that hedonism and virtuous self-governance are compatible if education teaches us to place our happiness in a conception of ourselves as rational beings, made in God’s image, and endowed with “the natural revelation” that is reason. Similar claims are made in highly popular devotional works such as Richard Allestree’s The Gentleman’s Calling (1763), the sermons of prominent Anglican divines such as Benjamin Whichcote and John Tillotson, and in the writings of women philosophers such as Mary Astell and Damaris Masham. The relationship between happiness and reason is a crucial theme, too, of the early novel, as developed by authors such as Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson. This seminar offers a broad-based introduction to the modern idea of happiness, as it is developed in Enlightenment literature, philosophy, educational treatises, and devotional writings. It will be centrally concerned with the complex and conflictual attempts to reconcile this-worldly and other-worldly happiness, scripture and “natural revelation,” pleasure and self-governance. Readings will range across fictional and non-fictional writings, and will include novels such as Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719) and Life’s Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748), Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and (selections from) Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-48), and Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). The course will be of interest not only to students working on British literature but also to Americanists (happiness is a prominent theme of the early republic and beyond) and students interested in affect theory and gender and sexuality studies.
- Restriction(s):
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Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
Restricted to students in the English department.
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