HISTORY 407/507

ANIMALS, AUTOMATONS, ABORIGINALS:

THE BOUNDARIES OF HUMANITY

IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Jacques Vaucanson’s duck

Prof. Ian F. McNeely – Winter 2002 – University of Oregon

Thinkers of the Enlightenment have been dubbed “the party of humanity.” They helped invent the modern Western notions of human rights and individual equality and put them on a secular and universal, as opposed to religiously sectarian, basis. What, though, is a human being? What do we share with others, transcending culture and race, that gives us a common humanity? What distinguishes us from inert matter, from other living beings, and from the natural world surrounding us?

In our own day, social trends and intellectual developments as diverse as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, environmentalism, and globalization make these questions profoundly important. In this course we will tackle them by looking at the period in European culture that in many ways first dealt with them. Our approach will be to focus on certain cultural preoccupations helping Enlightenment thinkers confront the boundaries of our humanity in the realms of art, literature, science, philosophy, and social life. These preoccupations included animals, whose bodies and “souls” came under protection by humanitarians even as many urban Europeans lost daily contact with them on the farm; automatons, robotic simulations of human beings (playing chess, most famously) that captivated the imagination of an epoch fascinated by the machine; and aboriginals, native peoples, especially in the Pacific, with whom European travelers, adventurers, and ethnographers first made contact in the eighteenth century.

Readings will include historical documents from the 1740s through the 1840s, such as La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, descriptions of children raised in the wild, and Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Students’ work for the course will culminate in a research paper. The choice of topics is broad but not entirely open: your work must fit under, or at least branch off from, one or more of the weekly themes listed on the schedule below. Each student will determine the precise length, methods, and form of the research project in a quasi-official contract negotiated with me. In most cases I expect a 15-page paper analyzing one or more of the primary course readings (listed below) and also drawing on outside secondary sources.

Mandatory weekly meetings will be devoted both to discussing readings and to planning, executing, and writing up the research paper. The course will also introduce students to online research techniques and resources in the humanities.

Prerequisites: basic familiarity with modern European history (e.g. through HIST 102-103), facility with basic Internet applications (e-mail, web browsers, Telnet).

Course requirements: class participation (15%), formal presentation on a week’s readings (15%), “contract” on research topic due Apr. 18 (10%), annotated bibliography due May 2 (10%), and final term paper due Jun. 10 by 5pm (50%). You may also be asked to bring in snippets of prose for in-class writing clinics toward the end of the term.

Schedule of readings and class meetings

A star (*) indicates coursepacked items. A double star (*) indicates xeroxed materials that will be made available later in the term should student interest dictate.

Apr. 4 Enlightenment discourse on science and morality

Introductory slide presentation

Film: Machine Dreams

Apr. 11 Machines and materialism

Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine

Denis Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream

Apr. 18 The chess automaton

*Karl Gottlieb Windisch, Inanimate Reason, a.k.a. Letters…on the Automaton Chess-Player

*Robert Willis, An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player, of Mr. De Kempelen

*E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Automata” from Tales ofHoffmann

On reserve

Jacques de Vaucanson, Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton: Or, Image Playing on the German-Flute

Charles Michael Carroll, The Great Chess Automaton

Contracts for research project due in class

Apr. 25 A machine like a man: Frankenstein’s Enlightenment roots

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (read entire, plus skim critical essays)

May 2 Discussion of research techniques and annotated bibliographies

No reading; start Itard and/or Feuerbach for next week

Annotated bibliographies due in class

May 9 Men like animals: Kaspar Hauser and the feral child of Aveyron

*Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, The Wild Boy of Aveyron

*Anselm Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser

May 16 Vivisection, vegetarianism, and animal cruelty

*Andreas-Holger Maehle and Ulrich Tröhler, “Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Attitudes and Arguments,” in Nicholaas Rupke, Vivisection in Historical Perspective, 14-47

*David Sabean, Power in the Blood, 174-198

*Humphrey Primatt, A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals

*John Oswald, The Cry of Nature: or, an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals

May 23 Orangutangs, noble savages, and the kingdom of nature

*Georges Buffon, Natural History (selections)

*Lord Monboddo, On the Origin and Progress of Language, chapters on the “Ourang Outang”

May 30 Sex in the South Pacific

Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundation of Inequality (preface and part I)

Jun. 6 Wrap-up

Jun. 10 Final papers due (5pm)