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WiSe 20/21: MÜ-Constr.Difference:Liter.+Cult.Hist.: Worlding the Long Eighteenth Century

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Comments

The eighteenth century was an era in which the world being transformed by the expansions of global trade networks and the proliferation of scientific voyages. The travel narrative became the second most popular form of literature, after the novel, and the twin vogues of opium-consumption and chinoiserie(a style inspired by Chinese and East Asian artistic traditions) gained increasing currency throughout the century. Yet although the British public displayed a sense of wonder and admiration for the cultures and peoples of other lands, there was also a growing sense of political urgency over the plight of the downtrodden as black Afro-Britons and ex-slaves began to campaign against abolition. This was clearly a world in transformation – a world in which people and objects were being moved across borders and territories with increasing frequency, thus giving rise to a multiplicity of encounters with difference. Yet how did writers and thinkers of the time negotiate this changing shape of the world and the relations within it? From Adam Smith’s formulations of a cosmopolitan world economic system, to Jeremy Bentham’s proposal of an ‘international law’, Kant’s ideas of universal hospitality, William Blake’s relational and networked worlds, and Thomas De Quincey’s expansive imperial nightmares, thinkers and writers during the time attempted to find ways to negotiate the increasing plurality of difference in a changing world. Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to consider how the transnational movements and global explorations of a long-eighteenth-century world in movement can be seen to have redefined notions of relationality, space, time, justice and morality – in short, what it means to live in a world.

A course reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to semester.

Set Texts: De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Penguin Classics)