Course Details

This is a course that is in part about the history of ideas, but seeks more to trace the way the imagination-the social imaginary-that shapes what we think of as real and unreal has changed over the last five hundred years, particularly in North Atlantic societies.

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 Medieval and Renaissance sources, spend time with four Shakespear’s plays, shift to the Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment thinkers, then to later 19th and 20th century existentialist figures,

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.