WiSe 23/24: PS-Introduction to Cultural Studies: Human, Animal, Thing in the 18th Century
Lenka Filipova
Comments
Even though the Enlightenment era is often associated with the emergence of human rights, humanitarian values, and the concept of ‘humanity’, the idea of ‘the human’ remains intriguingly elusive within the philosophical, political, scientific, and literary discourses and practices of the period. In this course, we will explore how philosophers, writers, visual artists, and, to some extent, scientific practitioners grappled with delineating the boundaries between humans, animals, and inanimate objects.
How do literary devices, rhetorical figures, and artistic forms give expression to the lives of animals and things, and how do they help elaborate human communities? How do these nonhuman perspectives contribute to the creation of humanity? What are the ethical and political consequences of the materialist understanding of humans as mere matter? Just what makes a thing count as human? Our exploration will encompass a diverse range of representations, including narratives told by nonhuman entities, fables, accounts of traveling objects, objects in collections, still-life paintings, trompe l'oeil, microscopic observations, the ‘bird’s eye view’, the camera obscura image, the philosophical treatise, poetry, and, to a certain extent, the novel. Through these various sources, we will examine the competing visions of human life as it is performed and co-constituted by animals and all kinds of things. Using an intersectional frame of analysis, we will also examine how these non/human entities enabled the renegotiation of personhood, as well as global communities in terms of gender, rank, property, and what we would now call race.
While the primary focus of the course will be on the cultural production of the long eighteenth century, especially its first half, we will also consider the relevance of these historical perspectives for current discussions on ‘the posthuman’ and philosophical materialisms.
All course materials will be available on Blackboard, with the exception of paintings that we will view at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie.
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments