Course Details

This is a course that is in part about the history of ideas, but seeks more to trace the way the imagination of what we think is real and unreal has changed over the last five hundred years, particularly in North Atlantic societies. This is a story that is more complex and interesting than simply to assume that science/rationality as it learned more about how the phenomenal world works supplanted religion/superstition and displaced the naive explanations for just about everything our premodern ancestors believed was true. This point of view is commonplace, but I would argue is simplistic and reductive.

This course will seek to understand some of the intellectual, economic, religious, and artistic/imaginative forces that drove this transformation. We will start some excerpts from The Romance of the Rose and Dante, then to artist and thinkers influenced by Ficino’s Florentine Platonic Academy. The goal here is to establish for students some sense of what it meant to think in a premodern enchanted milieu so that it might be contrasted with the modern disenchanted milieu they take for granted. We will spend some time with Shakespeare as a figure who was very much influenced by the traditions of premodern enchantment while at the same time being a transitional figure to a modern, disenchanted imagination of the world. We’ll look at how the intellectual and imaginative projects of the Renaissance and the Reformation influenced him, and how they shaped the concerns he sought to portray in his plays, particularly the comedies, but ending with a deep dive into King Lear.

From the Renaissance, we will discuss the secularizing impact of the Reformation, particularly Calvinism, the Wars of Religion, and the Enlightenment. We’ll then spend some time with the imaginative work of F. Schiller, S.T. Coleridge, Wm. Wordsworth, and P.B Shelley as representative figures. We will look at how the post-Kantian German idealists-Herder, Schelling, Fichte-in reaction to the overly rationalistic, disenchanting, objectifying and alienating effect of the Enlightenment projects provided the intellectual framework for them to channel the irrational, to celebrate the Self, and to overcome the deepening sense of fragmentation and alienation that accompanied the first stages of the Industrial revolution.

In the third phase, we will move into post WWII literature, film, and philosophy. We’ll give an overview of post-Nietzschean Western philosophy and its impact on the imagination of particularly Americans in the post-world War II through post 9/11 era.

Since any one of these topics could be a course in itself, the main thrust of this course is to give students an overview of the most important ideas over the last 500 years as they have influenced the Western secularizing imagination of reality. The goal is to help students to understand how these thinkers and artists have contributed to the way they think and experience the world, whether they are aware of their influence or not. Students will be required to know the texts excerpted from larger works that will be made available in a substantial coursepack, and then select a particular era to do a deeper dive and work from materials provided in lecture and discussion groups.

We will use Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’ (Harvard University Press, 2007) to provide the conceptual framework that tells the story of how the ‘social imaginary’, particularly in North Atlantic societies, morphed from what he describes as premodern imaginaries that were enchanted, i.e., an imagined world full of spirits and spiritual forces, to a modern one that became  profoundly disenchanted, that is following Weber, a world that has lost any robust collective or public sense of the sacred.

The course explores the hypothesis that figures like Shakespeare and the Coens  are transitional artists for their different times: Shakespeare for the transition from the premodern to the modern, the Coens for the transition from the modern to whatever comes next.

This course is in part about the history of ideas, but seeks more to trace the way the imagination of what we think is real and unreal has changed over the last millennium. This course will seek to understand  the intellectual, economic, religious, and artistic/imaginative forces that drove this transformation. Lectures will provide necessary historical and conceptual background. Optional out-of-class film viewing will be scheduled, and time will be apportioned each week for  discussion to hash through the themes and materials presented each week. Coursepack readings and films will be used to bring these ideas down to earth in such a way that we can contrast how people imagined the world hundred years ago with the way we imagine it now.  

The course will have two focus points: Part I will focus on late medieval and Renaissance influences on Shakespeare to understand better the premodern imagination that still played a deeply influential role in shaping his work. In the second half of the course, there will be an overview of the Enlightenment and Romantic thinking and imagination that has shaped what we have come to think of as the ‘modern’. 

The main thrust of this course is to give students an overview of the most important ideas over the last millennium as they have influenced the Western secularizing imagination of reality. This shift in the imagination from to one that is enchanted to  disenchanted, while having an enormous impact first in the societies of the North Atlantic, has had and is having, for better and worse, an equally significant  impact on cultures and societies everywhere else.

In addition to assigned course readings students need to spend at least 2 hours a week outside of class watching films that relate to course content