General honors (GH) classes

gh 201 - IntroDuction to the Great Works: An Intellectual History of Modern Europe

Spring 2013 - CRN: 13935

     
 

course description

This exciting course is based on the close reading of classic texts in modern European culture.  These texts include Hume’s Natural History of Religion, Marx/Engels’, The Communist Manifesto, Mill’s Autobiography, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Sartre’s Nausea, Voltaire’s Candide or Optimism, and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.  The course commences with a detailed study of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its impact on the French Revolution.  It concludes with a survey of European socialism, feminism, fascism, existentialism, and critical theory.  The objective of the course is to acquaint students with Modern European intellectual revolutions, political ideologies, and aesthetic currents. 

Instructor: Dr. Ralph Leck

Dr. Ralph Leck is a specialist in modern European intellectual, cultural, and gender history.  In addition to a Ph.D. and M.A. in History, he earned a certificate in critical theory from the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, where he studied with Jean-François Lyotard and attended the lectures of Jacques Derrida.  Dr. Leck is the former director of Peace and Justice Studies at Marian University.  His publications include Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology: The Birth of Modernity, 1880-1920 (available on Amazon.com/books) and “Anti-Essentialist Feminism Versus Misogynist Sexology in Fin de Siècle Vienna,” Modern Intellectual History (2012).  His book—Vita Sexualis: The History & Theory of European Sexual Science, 1860-1900—is forthcoming from Berghahn Books in 2013.

TR 11:00-12:15
Ralph.Leck@indstate.edu