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In his classic study, Paul Hazard suggested that what distinguished the eighteenth century from its predecessor was a newly-discovered appetite for mobility over stability. This can be seen in the vogue for the Grand Tour and for large-scale scientific expeditions, the explosion of epistolary works and travel narratives, and the widespread use of exotic characters in popular fiction (Oroonoko, The Persian Letters, and Lahontan’s bon sauvage). In fact, the very identity of the Enlightenment seems to be bound up with notions of dynamism and mobility. Philosophes such as Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau used travel writing and exotic knowledge to corrosive and entertaining effect in their best-selling writings. The Scots established the modern human sciences upon a very mobile (that is, comparative) conception of knowledge. This symposium will revisit the notion of movement during the era of the Enlightenment, in the transmission and circulation of ideas, the depiction of movement in literature, the arts, philosophy and science.
PROGRAM
8:30-9:00 am Coffee/tea
9:00 am Opening Remarks, Dean of Arts
Plenary session 9:15-10:15 am
Cindy Ermus (UofL): Communicating Disease: Information Networks During the Plague of Provence
10:15-10:30 am Coffee break
10:30-12:00 pm Session 1: Representations of movement
Martin Wagner (UofC): The Problem of Motion in Goethe’s Literary and Scientific Writings
Anthony Wall (UofC): Diderot’s Chronophotographic Writing in Rameau’s Nephew
Guy Obrecht (MRU): Lunacy and Illusion: Space Travel and the Sound of the Stable in Haydn’s Il Mondo Della Luna1
12:15-1:15 pm Lunch break
1:15-2:45 pm Session 2: From motion to thoughts in motion
Antoine Eche (MRU/ICD): Eighteenth Century Travel Writing: Enlightenment in Motion?
Jeffrey M. Suderman (MRU): Religion in Motion: Changing Religious Values in the Age of Enlightenment.
David Clemis (MRU): Between the Static and the Dialectical: Enlightenment Visions of Societies in Motion
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