Dreams of Reason: Satire and Travel in the Enlightenment

By Community High School and Community High School Enlightenment Class

The Enlightenment ushered in a profound shift in the foundations of European and American power, which still shape the world today. The era not only re-invented Philosophy, Politics, Economics,History and Theology, but also ushered in the birth or maturity of new academic disciplines: Science, Sociology, Anthropology, and Fine Art. The promoters of Enlightenment not only valued science over superstition, logic over tradition; they created whole new methods, institutions, and vocabularies to produce and regulate knowledge, and to make that knowledge available, especially to those in power. The new values they were promoted include religious freedom, liberal education, the rule of Science, political equality and democracy - a world "enlightened" by knowledge and led to a more ethical and happy life. Yet the age of Enlightenment was also that of rampant colonialism, racism, persecution abroad, and within Europe was used to justify vast extensions of state power, widening gaps between rich and poor, the destruction of rural lifestyles and economies, and the incarceration of the poor, diseased, politically dissident, and all those considered "mad" by rationalist logic. Paradoxically, one of the greatest tools of this most logical of all movements was humor. Satire was used both to support Enlightenment goals and to critique its failures and excesses, sometimes in the same text; it was also full of the whimsical imagination, laughter, cynicism, passion, and absurdity kept out of the movement's more "rational" texts. Centering our investigation on two great Enlightenment satires - Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Voltaire's Candide, students of Community High School's 'Enlightenment, Satire & Travel' course explored how and why this intellectual movement transformed its world - who benefited? Who was exploited? How are we to interpret the contradictions and hypocrisies? Do they continue to exist within our own globalized world, shaped by the world of the Enlightenment? In this book, students created their own satires - either a whimsical travel-log like Gulliver and Candide, or a new, crack-brained intellectual discipline - through which to work out these questions and express their own critiques of today's society, and the inheritance or loss of Enlightenment within it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1975997611
• ISBN13: 9781975997618
• Release Date: August 2017
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 1.11 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.3" x 7.5"