Adventures in the History of Ideas

Overview

Adventures in the History of Ideas’ is designed to introduce Stage One students, in English but potentially across AEL and AHSS (as an elective), to a range of social, historical, philosophical and moral concepts that have been central to the historical emergence and current predicaments of Western culture, broadly conceived. Students undertaking the module will be introduced to the historical and intellectual development of key concepts in the Arts and Humanities by means of the assessment of literary representations of, and responses to, them, from classical and Judeo-Christian literatures, via medieval and early modern texts, to Enlightenment, modern, postmodern and contemporary texts. Provision of a broad chronological understanding of the emergence, development and various crises of Western culture is an ancillary objective of the module: students will complete the module with a more nuanced understanding of cultural and historical periodisation and will be able to apply the interrogative modes they have encountered on the module to a range of thematic issues.

Learning Objectives

Having completed this module, students will have developed a self-reflexive grasp of the historical development of Western culture, from classical Rome and Greece and the growth and influence of Christianity as an institutional and moral force, to the emergence of a variety of humanisms and their role in the beginnings of ‘Modernity’ and their subsequent crises of the 20th and 21st centuries. They will assess questions of human and non-human life and sexual and racial difference in a range of literary case-studies. They will be introduced to the politics of the historiography and periodisation of Western culture and to the role such intellectual mechanisms play in articulating and maintaining the supposed exemplarity of Western, European, ideas. They will have encountered texts not typically available to them elsewhere on the English curriculum.

Skills

Having completed this module, students will:
• have learned to examine critically their own intellectual ‘sacred cows’ and inherited assumptions;
• have been encouraged to practice the lateral application of critical practices to a range of ‘real world’ issues;
• have learned to read ‘secondary’/ ‘non-literary’ texts critically;
• have been gently introduced to the interrogative modes of critical and cultural theory’
• have learned to work collaboratively and assess one another’s work in peer review

Assessment

None