World Literatures 100dm - Introduction to Comparative Literature: Dreams, Magic and the Sublime in World Literature

Modernity is traditionally characterized as the Age of Reason and the beginning of a radical critique of religious superstition and political obscurantism. This vision of culture tends to repress the fascination with madness, dreams, the irrational, and the sublime that permeated the most advanced literatures and theories. Starting in the late eighteenth century, avant-garde artists begin to explore the claim that logic and rationality cannot account for all of human experience. We will be investigating this phenomenon from a literary, artistic, and philosophical point of view, from the era of the Enlightenment philosophers to the twentieth century.  (E)