I'm a bit surprised that you on the one hand call Kant an non-eighteenth-century writer, but on the other hand do include Goethe and Mary Shelley.
And it's a pity the Romanticism course has claimed the sublime, because using one concept's different interpretations can help distinguish between different kinds of Enlightenment aesthetics. In aesthetics concepts like the beautiful, mimesis, "nature",... get different meanings, and those can be linked to greater schemes of thought.
I think the sublime is a prime example of such a concept. Moreover, Ashfield & De Bolla's "The Sublime. a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory" could provide many links between your 3 literary texts.
Kant's answer to 'what is Enlightenment' could have been a useful text as well: it is both short and clear (two rare qualities for any Kant text). Moses Mendelssohn has written an answer to that very same question - I haven't looked into that text, but I do know Kant refers to it, and I recall reading somewhere that Kant is exaggerating the similarities (perhaps the differences between Kant and 'the Jewish Luther' might show why Kant can be called both the climax and the end of Enlightenment philosophy?).
For primary texts of German Classicism/Enlightenment in English translation, I usually use H.B Nisbet (ed.), "German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism. Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe", especially Winckelmann and Lessing are interesting for the links between classicism and Enlightenment, I think.
As you can tell, my focus is mainly on German philosophy, but I know of a Cambridge Companion to Scottish Enlightentment. Maybe that can be of use? Strangely enough there appears to be no Cambridge Companion to Enlightenment tout court. But I found this on amazon: "The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader", edited by Paul Hyland, Olga Gomez and Francesca Greensides (Routledge, 2001). It looks like it's a bit of everything.
A few thoughts, and then a few suggestions, to see what others think.
1. I second Christophe about taking advantage of concepts like "the sublime," even if they appear in other courses. These are major concepts for 18c aesthetics, and the differences between yours and the "Romantic" treatment is precisely what students need to learn about.
You might also think about the overlap betw. Roms and 18c writer as "reinforcement" rather than repetition. Believe me, they are grateful for these kinds of reiterations, not bored by them.
Students are sometimes amazed that things they learn in one class will appear in a different form in another class. Another important lesson for them, since they're often used to the artificially self-enclosed courses and periodizations of textbooks and bad survey teaching. Teach against that attitude.
2. Christophe is also very helpfully pointing to the European dimension of these questions, which you will have to narrow or broaden depending on your own ideas of the course, other reading they've done, and your own ideas about the period. This also affects periodization.
Taking a look at a bunch of anthologies might help give you a more concrete idea of what to include: I'm pretty sure I've seen a Portable Enlightenment volume, ed. Isaac Kramnick, and after a quick amazon.com search I can see there's also a Roy Porter volume, along with a pretty good David Simpson volume covering German criticism between Lessing and Hegel, along with the excellent Nisbet recommended by Christophe. Which anthology you choose will probably determine a lot of aspects of the course, including breadth. So maybe begin there.
3. Critical theory can easily be taught alongside Enlightenment writers, because, as Simpson's anthology points out, much of the critical theory written after Adorno represents an extension via auto-critique of various dimensions of what we loosely call "the "Enlightenment project."
The key for undergrads is probably to pair up Kant's What is Enlightenment with Foucault; selections from The Dialectic of Enlightenment with Sade or Swift or Shelley etc. etc. Just assume that you will read slowly, and restrict the amount of reading to small enough works so that students can absorb them and feel some mastery over the subject matter.
And don't worry about not giving them a complete account of either side, critical theory or Enlightenment. They must learn the simple or reduced version of these contexts before they can take on the more nuanced accounts. Believe me, you're giving them, and yourself, plenty to think about.
How does that sound?
Best wishes,
DM
I have to second Christopher Madelein's recommendation of the Kant essay. In my own "Enlightenment" class (200-level gen. ed. course, which really should be titled "Restoration and C18 lit. but isn't), we just spent a week on the Kant essay and then the "reader" chunk of the Hyland book mentioned as part of my grudging effort to orient the literary texts that we are reading within the course rubric. The Kant essay (and I've taught it before) goes over really well. In some ways it locks onto their preconceptions (if they have any) about what Enlightenment is (roughly, the importance of human reason and not believing in God anymore and democracy), but in doign so it forces them to recognize ways in which the Enlightenment is more complicated than that. I'm not sure how well the Hyland readings went over. The "Reader" part of it is a brief overview of C20 interpretations of and debates about the Enlightenment with excerpts from Cassirer, Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas, Gay, Darnton, Lyotard, Foucault, Tomaselli, and Scott. It was pretty dense and chewy material for them to cope with--I ended up urging them to focus on Cassirer, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, and Habermas, and I found myself doing a lot more summarizing and schematizing and thematizing (and inevitably, reducing and distorting) in order to get them through it. But bless their hearts, they seemed really INTERESTED in the material and willing to put some effort into trying to make sense of it. They also seemed to enjoy taking a breather from primary texts and having some time to reflect more broadly on what it's all about.
Thanks all for the feedback. My categorizing of Kant as a non-eighteenth-century writer was a typo. Because I have two different models for the course and Kant was currently in the one that focuses on mainly non-eighteenth-century texts, I characterized his “What Is Enlightenment?” essay as a non-eighteenth-century reading. As for the literary texts, I needed to include a few in the course description, so I chose some that deal with the limits of human knowledge and issues of representation. Paradise Lost was the first that came to mind; then I added Frankenstein, which engages so well with Milton’s epic. Both of these led me to the Faust story. I’m still deciding between Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus or Goethe’s Faustus, both of which are not exactly of the time period. On the other hand, course descriptions have to sound tempting, or no one will register for the course. All of these texts are fairly popular with undergraduates I teach. I could make a change, or just keep them to give students a break from the dry primary texts of the “Enlightenment.”
Based on all of your experiences teaching the Kant essay, I’m definitely going to include it on my syllabus. I may even start the course with it, even though many of the texts we will read were written before 1784, when Kant’s essay was published. And you’ve all given me some good ideas about how to pair the critical texts of “the Enlightenment project” with eighteenth-century primary texts. Thanks also to KW, for her detailed post on what to expect of and from undergraduates who may be taking the course. I also really appreciated Dave’s suggestion about “reinforcing” the other Humanities course covering the Romantic period with my discussion of the eighteenth-century sublime and aesthetic theory. That’s a useful way of thinking about it.
I plan to look into the Portable Enlightenment collection as well as the readers edited by Roy Porter, David Simpson, and Nisbet. These are exactly what I’ve been looking for, but I didn’t know anyone who had firsthand knowledge of them. It doesn’t help that the course hasn’t been taught here in a while, as the Humanities major seems to be dying a slow death. Although I settled on anthologies for my standard eighteenth-century literature courses long ago, finding a specific Enlightenment one has been entirely foreign to me.
By now I’ve taught eighteenth-century lit as an English course many times, and the syllabus only needs minor tweaking now and then. Part of my dilemma is that I feel the “Classicism and Enlightenment” course in the Humanities major should not just be my usual “Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Lit” with a different name. But I can understand what KW said about “grudging” efforts to fit within a specifically Enlightenment course rubric.
Many thanks again for all the suggestions.
A few more thoughts, as this stuff has been on my mind of late: I shopped around a little for Enlightenment readers and ended up NOT using one (I put the readings from the Hyland anthology, a small fraction of the whole book, on electronic reserve for my course...) but there is a nice little anthology simply titled, I believe, The Enlightenment and edited by Margaret Jacobs that I seriously thought about using. It's a small collection, a good size (and price) for a course that requires students to buy other books as well, and I believe it has the Kant essay and a nice mixture of high-canonical and more broadly representative texts. Of course, the exam copy is in my office and I am not at the moment...
MH's original post mentioned the necessity of explaining "the Restoration" to undergraduates, and I found the Restoration a useful concept for bridging my more literary frame of reference and "the Enlightenment" and for getting students to think about the Enlightenment as being more complicated than their assumptions about reason n' democracy n' no more religion. On the first day I got them talking about what they thought the term "Enlightenment" meant, and most of them (as I anticipated) talked about the political ideals behind the American Revolution. I then pointed to our course book, which has the Restoration in its title, and asked them if they knew what got "restored" at the beginning of the period we're studying. As MH noted, they had no clue, so I got to point out to them that it was a monarch, which floored them, given how successfully they'd just convinced themselves that "the Enlightenment" was all about reason dawning on the world in the form of (ahem) American electoral politics.
For what it's worth, the students in this course have seemed really hungry for whatever I can give them in the way of historical background--as MH pointed out, it isn't known to them, and the realization that monarchy can be something people write and theorize and reason about (and not just feel oppressed by) seems to be one of those things that suddenly makes their universe seem bigger than it was before.
"Classicism and the Enlightenment" with the range of readings being proposed sounds like a really interesting course--I hope MH will keep us posted as she continues to develop it!
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