ENGL 2100 - Culture Makers & Culture Breakers - Summer 2022

Course Welcome

Welcome to section 01F of ENGL 2100: Literature and the Humanities. Our focus during this course will be on the people and the works of literature that either helped create lasting traditions (the "culture makers") or worked hard to tear down the existing structures of their day, because they considered those structures unjust or an insult to our common humanity (the "culture breakers").

But you'll see as we roll through this material that any decent culture breaker is actually a culture maker. Those who can successfully point out the failings of a culture — and can convince enough people that they are right — help to create a new culture, one that is more just. We'll look at work by people like Voltaire, who urged us to think about the world rationally instead of just relying on what some institution tells us to think. Or there's someone like Frederick Douglass, whose work helped to convince people of the inhuman cruelty of slavery. I could list every author we're looking at here and illustrate how they both fought against cultural structures and helped to create new ones to take their places.

This fighting against the status quo wasn't just reserved for single people. The big historical movements that have happened over the last three centuries are also all about pushing back against what already exists. So we can think of these intellectual currents as something like a pendulum that swings back and forth. I'll pick an arbitrary starting point to show you what I mean:
We'll start back in the 18^th century, the age of European colonization, which was one of the most obvious and sustained periods of culture-making and -breaking in history. The intellectual current that spurred this move, where European powers sought to dominate other cultures, was known as The Enlightenment, or The Age of Reason.


We'll then move to the 19^th century, and look at texts from the Romantic period, where the makers and breakers fought against those who had gone before them. Cultural encounters become internal, between classes and genders within the same society.



The Modernist period, beginning in the 20^th century, was deeply affected by the horrors of WWI, and the realization that social institutions, nations, and entire cultures could not control the dark underside of human nature. You could call it a period of hopelessness, and work of the meakers and breakers reflected that.


Finally, the Contemporary period (which is defined pretty broadly), has a much fuller appreciation of the independence of world cultures, recognizing that each must be considered on its own terms. We're probably not as hopeless as the Modernists, but maybe that's because we're not paying as much attention to the world around us.

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The links below will take you to the course syllabus and the podcasts.