The Dark Enlightenment: Study of a Theme: The Dark Enlightenment

The turn to science and rationality, the age of reason, the Enlightenment. As its name suggests, this intellectual movement marks Europe’s development out of medieval darkness into modern enlightenment. Enlightenment thought served as and remains the tenant of Western social, aesthetic, and intellectual order. As such, the movement’s philosophical and scientific contributions are often treated out of context to uphold its glamour of Western civilizational progress. This course aims to historicize the Enlightenment, revealing its dark, imperialistic underbelly. To do so, we will first carefully read the works of the most renowned voices of the period—such as Immanuel Kant, John Locke, René Descartes, among others—with a keen eye for these writers’ intellectual lineages and investments in Greek, Roman, and Middle Eastern philosophy. In the latter half of the course, we will examine the movements developing alongside and in reaction to the Enlightenment, including the Oriental Renaissance, Romanticism, and the Gothic. Approaching these texts in their historical context, students will acquire new theoretical lenses and practice their close reading skills for a range of genres, from histories, travelogues, and grammar manuals to poems, novels, and fairy tales. By incorporating into Enlightenment history those underrepresented voices who contributed to, built off of, or resisted this movement, students will illuminate a new history of global intellectual and cultural exchange that has shaped the Western world as we know it.