Varieties of Enchantment

(Seminar) This course examines how conflicting knowledges and belief-systems have been rendered occult, marginal, or repressed, and it refocuses attention on enchantment in modernity and modern disciplines as a means of their recovery. Among the questions we will explore are the following: From what place, and by what means, is the world enchanted? Is enchantment a compensation for what Freud called “the lost appeal of life on this earth”? Or is it ultimately a privileging of the irrational in a world dominated by reason? What is the place of science in enchantment? Does the decline of religion precipitate the re-enchantment of the world via art? And finally and most importantly, can we understand intellectual formations by revisiting the processes of enchantment and disenchantment? Readings will include conceptual works by Weber, Adorno, Gauchet, Saler, Owen, Latour, and During; and literary works by Kipling, Haggard, du Maurier, Wells, Blavatsky, and Lovecraft, among others. OPEN TO QUALIFIED UNDERGRADUATES WITH PERMISSION FROM THE INSTRUCTOR.