300-400 level courses are on special topics and are more advanced. They often presuppose some basic knowledge in the field and should be more difficult courses than courses at the 1-199 levels. The department is trying to insure that some 400 level courses, although substantially more difficult, are also small in size; they thus may be suitable for graduate students.
HIST 418 European Intellectual History since 1945
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
SEM
This course concentrates on French intellectual history after 1945, with some excursions into Germany. We will explore changing conceptions of the intellectual, from Sartre's concept of the 'engagement' to Foucault's idea of the 'specific intellectual'; the rise and fall of existentialism; structuralism and poststructuralism; and the debate over 'postmodernity.' One of the central themes of the course will be the debate between 'humanism' and 'anti-humanism'. If late nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinkers were preoccupied by the question of the "death of God," much philosophical discussion in France in the later twentieth century was obsessed by the death of "Man." Many of the dominant thinkers of the post-war period have exposed the idea of the human "subject" -- the "self" or "ego" -- to unprecedented criticism. What is meant by the "death of Man"? Does the human "self" have a "center," or is the self a linguistic construction or the fragmented product of relations of power and desire? What are the political and social implications of the critique of "humanism"? What are the implications for our conception of "reason," "history," and "progress"? Can "humanism" be reformulated in the face of its critics?
Course Syllabus (PDF)
