17367

VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Enlightenment Cosmopolitans

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Kommentar

The eighteenth century was a period in which the expansions of global trade networks and scientific exploration resulted not only in the emergence of modern capitalism, but similarly in the movement of people and cultural artefacts across national and international borders. It was an age in which Europeans developed a fascination for Chinese and East Asian artistic traditions, and in which the travel narrative emerged as the most popular genre of literature next to the novel. Philosophers resurrected the ancient Greek concept of the kosmopolites to refer to citizens of the world, with Christoph Martin Wieland using it in 1788 to define humanity as so many branches of a single tree, and Immanuel Kant proposing a cosmopolitan law as the treatment of individuals as human beings rather than as citizens of the state. At the core of these ideas is that we have obligations to others, and that we take seriously the value of human life, as well as the various practices and beliefs that give these lives significance. Yet whilst most of the English-language narratives of cross-cultural encounter during this period were written by British travellers and voyagers, it was also the case that those from other lands wrote of their experiences in contact with British subjects. This course will compare the writings of eighteenth-century British, Indian, and African cosmopolitans who either narrate an encounter with difference as intercultural exchange or situate that difference within British culture itself. Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to consider to what extent these writers reconceive a cosmopolitan existence as an obligation to human life, and to what extent they imagine and negotiate the various dimensions of intercultural contact, hospitality, globalisation and the emergence of modern capitalism.

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

Students are expected to acquire the following texts:

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Turkish Embassy Letters. Any Edition.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Any Edition.
Mahomet, Dean. The Travels of Dean Mahomet. Any Edition.
Sancho, Ignatius. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. Any Edition.

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