Wesleyan University - College of Letters

Applications Due: Monday, March 26 2012 by 3pm
COL Open House: Monday, March 5, 2012 at 4:15 PM.
COL Library - 41 Wyllys

19th c. Europe (spring)
Portraits of Napoleon and Queen Victoria may have frozen these personalities in time, but 19th c. Europe is all about changes. So much happens over this century that it is called, rightfully so, the long century, with some historians ending it on the eve of the 1914 world war. With political, philosophical, literary, and industrial revolutions shaking European societies, European letters of the time highlight the many contradictions of 19th c. Europe: how Romantics rebelled against conformity, Reason, and organized Religion; how God died for Nietzsche but came back for Dostoyevsky, only to be questioned again by Darwin; how the 1789 declaration of Human Rights didn't end slavery for several more decades in European colonies while serfdom survived in Russia; how the late 18th c. feminist discourse of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouge was silenced by new 19th c. mores and ever tighter corsets; how Marx challenged Bourgeois values, how democracy progressed in Europe while Europe colonized Africa. So much more happens in this century of contradictions that you simply need to take the course.