CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: “Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal: Three Modernities” (3-4 credit hours)
Hall Bjørnstad (French & Italian)
Tuesdays, 4:00 PM – 6:30 PM, Ballantine Hall 106
This course meets with FRIT-F 523.
What happens when a reader informed by recent theoretical inquiries approaches an early modern text? Will the theory illuminate the text or only colonize it? Is the absence of present-day concerns desirable or even possible while reading texts from the past? Conversely, to what extent can the engagement with earlier texts prove helpful, even essential for our thinking about more contemporary concerns? How does our theoretical understanding of the past as new beginnings, roots, genealogies, prehistories, thresholds, reoccupations or ruptures inform the purpose of the work we do in the humanities and our contribution to the thinking about contemporary problems? And how do foundational texts from the past change when we approach them with new questions addressing issues such as indigeneity and race?
This graduate seminar will explore questions like these through a comparative exploration of key texts by Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), René Descartes (1596-1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), and of their mobilization in canonical reflections on the predicament of modernity, not only among mid- to late-twentieth century French theorists, including Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Barthes, Nancy, de Certeau and Marin, but also German theorists from Benjamin and Auerbach to Blumenberg, just to mention a few. Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal have been posited as the origin of wildly different – and often competing notions of – modernity. What is left of these modernities today? How can each of them – and the constellation of the three – inform and challenge our theoretical inquiries in 2025/2026? Does the notion of an “early modernity” at work in key theories of modernity from the recent past have a future?
For the final project for this course, the participants will have the choice between writing a traditional research paper or a “book review essay,” where a minimum of two critical texts are assessed in a way that highlights and reflects on the relationship between recent critical inquiries in the humanities and an early modern text (by Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal or another early modern writer). The course will not require any prior knowledge of the three early modern writers or their historical context, and all readings and class discussion will be in English.
