Thomas Carlyle was an essayist and social commentator writing at the interstice of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Steeped in German Idealist philosophy, he went on to influence important thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Works such as Sartor Resartus (1833-4) are seen as canonical today, and Carlyle is still anthologized as an important voice in the nineteenth-century literary landscape.
Carlyle, however, was not a fan of democracy. Today often called a reactionary conservative, Carlyle railed against systematic thought, economics, materialism, liberal politics, and many of the basic tenants of modern democratic life. In this course, we will be reading Carlyle’s major works in order to critically engage with this complex thinker by writing essays of our own.
This course, therefore, has two objectives:
1.) to improve our cultural literacy of nineteenth-century English literary, political, social, and aesthetic topics by reading Carlyle’s works
2.) to practice critical engagement with complex themes through the studied production of expository essays
- Dozent/in: Natalie Roxburgh