With a focus on Western Europe, this course is designed to make you familiar with the major intellectual movements and thinkers in the modern period. We cover both the towering, canonical figures and those critical of the canon. We look at the main schools of thought, the major political doctrines, and key literary and artistic groups, including humanism, Protestantism, Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism, realism, nationalism, liberalism, capitalism, socialism, racism, feminism, colonialism, impressionism to surrealism, fascism, existentialism, and postmodernism. We also discuss the most significant conceptual categories that have defined the modern European world, including the concepts of nature, human nature, God, truth, reason, freedom, justice, gender, and race. The course differs from other history courses in that its emphasis is on intellectual matters--ideas, discourses, thinkers, schools of thought--and differs from a philosophy, literature or social science course in its emphasis on how ideas both reflect and contest their historical contexts.
Course Attributes: AS HUM; EN H
