Teaching

HS: The Sentimental Mode in the Eighteenth Century

The eighteenth century gave rise to a new literary and philosophical mode that significantly shaped the cultural products, practices, and discourses of its time. In part a reaction to Enlightenment’s privileging of rationality, this so-called sentimental mode instead emphasises the importance of emotions and feelings.  In our seminar, we will explore the ubiquity of the sentimental mode in the latter half of the eighteenth century; considering the large variety of genres and contexts (e.g., discourses about poverty, gender relations, or the abolition of slavery) in which it appears. After a brief historical introduction to the eighteenth century, we will focus on the key ideas connected to what is referred to as moral sentimentalism, i.e., the school of moral philosophy that forms the theoretical basis for the sentimental mode in eighteenth-century literature and culture at large. The remainder of the semester is then dedicated to the analysis of key literary texts that founded the sentimental literary tradition in the mid-eighteenth century (e.g., Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling or Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey) as well as later texts reacting to or even satirizing sentimental literature such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In addition to the sentimental novel, we will also consider parallel developments in the field of theatre, where playwrights like Oliver Goldsmith (e.g., She Stoops to Conquer or The Good-Natur’d Man) similarly engaged with sentimental comedies that were highly popular a couple of decades earlier (e.g., Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers) in an ironic manner.

AS: Culture

AS Culture extends the knowledge and skills acquired in GS Culture and is structured along the lines of cultural theory, cultural history, and cultural analysis. The course also comprises case studies of texts in various media to illustrate respective approaches. Depending on the lecturer’s field of expertise, these examples will primarily focus on either Great Britain or the United States.