Instructor: R. Briggs
From José Cecilio del Valle’s call for a legion of savants to study Spanish America and publicize its results to Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the school as an organizing principle of local government, Enlightenment blossoms in the New World as proposals for transformational schools—schools that will create new citizens and a new body politic. At the same time that it takes on intrinsic importance as a social and political project, the school develops a rich analogical relationship with notions of personal and historical destiny. Life narratives (Sarmiento, Franklin) become metaphors for the national and regional independence, and the narrative structure of the bildung leaves its mark in essays, novels and magazines concerned (overtly or not) with the problem of public Enlightenment and popular education.
Focusing on the historical period between U.S. independence and the post-1898 consolidation of a firm north-south opposition, we will read essays, novels, autobiographies and magazines from the U.S. and Spanish America. In a time period marked by collaboration, multinational publishing projects, and lively expatriate communities, we will explore both the interactions between north and south and the broader hemispheric ramifications of the era’s most pressing questions: the relationship between education and aesthetics; the moral and political influence of the novel and life narrative; and the Enlightenment paradox of emancipation on the one hand, and educational coercion and control on the other.
The course will be taught in English.
