HUM 221 - Modern European Humanities I

The world we live in today is heir to ideas, political movements, social structures, and forms of artistic, literary, and philosophical expression that arose in Europe over the last few centuries. This class covers roughly the period 1750-1850, focusing on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Romanticism, and the industrial revolution. Major topics include the rise and development of languages of economics (capitalism, socialism), politics (liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, nationalism, colonialism, revolution, terror), gender (feminism), race (anti-slavery movements and new forms of prejudice), religion (secularization, emancipation of religious minorities), aesthetics, and new understandings of nature and technologies of knowledge. Reading often includes texts from Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot’s Encyclopedia, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, O. Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Marx.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I, Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 or sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: HUM 221 is the first in a two-semester sequence (with HUM 222) that are best taken in order, but can also be taken out of order or independently.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.