French 475 - Diderot’s Lumières

Denis Diderot, the genial philosophe at the center of the French Enlightenment, was the author of novels, plays, art criticism, music theory, and works on mathematics, politics, and philosophy.  As co-editor of the Encyclopédie, the French Enlightenment’s most ambitious intellectual project, he recruited contributions from the most distinguished thinkers of his time, while writing scores of articles on subjects ranging from botany and law to mythology and carpentry.  We will explore a variety of texts drawn from Diderot’s oeuvre, beginning with La Religieuse, a fictional portrait of eighteenth-century convent life, and Le Rêve de d'Alembert, a philosophical dialogue in which Diderot reveals his dangerously materialist views.  We will subsequently read brief selections from the Encyclopédie; excerpts from the Salons; excerpts from Diderot’s letters to his lover, the Lettres à Sophie Volland, acclaimed as a masterpiece of its genre; and his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, a depiction of a utopian Tahiti whose social and sexual customs produce harmonious relationships not just among Tahitians but between Tahitians and their natural environment.  We will give special attention to Le Neveu de Rameau--a novel whose impact on nineteenth-century writers and thinkers was profound, and which is still startling in its modernity. Conducted in French.

Requisite:  A 300-level French course or equivalent. Spring semester: Professor de la Carrera.

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Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: written work, readings, oral presentations, instruction in languages other than English.