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Course Info for HMTS - 213 - 01, Spring 2025
Class number: 2687 Title: Reason and Its Discontents Department: Humanities Gateway
Career: Undergraduate Component: Seminar Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: No Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 19 Current enrollment: 13 Available seats: 6
Start date: Tuesday, January 21, 2025 End date: Friday, May 9, 2025 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: TR: 9:25AM-10:40AM, LSC - 133 Instructor(s): Assaiante, Julia
Prerequisite(s): Only students in the Humanities Gateway Program are allowed to enroll in this course.
Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities and Global Requirements
Course Description:
This course traces the valorization of reason, science, and progress that occurs in European literature from the 18th century into the modern era. Some questions that will guide our engagement will be: what understanding of the human does such a vaunting of reason imply? What happens to religion and faith in the 'Age of Reason' and the modern era it helped shape? How can competing ethical, moral, or truth claims be understood if there is, indeed, a common, rational framework of understanding? What is lost, perhaps, when reason, science and progress reign unchallenged? Texts will include works from JW Goethe, Mary Shelley, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Woolf, Elie Wiesel, and others.