Candide

After a few general questions, we’re going to focus on humor and the enlightenment – two words that aren’t often used in the same sentence.
BTW – I assume that you folks will read the introductions to the works

• First of all, what’s the difference between real and symbolic characters?

Candide
Pangloss
Cunegonde
Abigail (Old woman with half a buttock)
Baron (Cunegonde’s brother)
Cacambo
Martin
Paquette
Brother Giroflee
Jacques

• What do you make of the title? What does it mean to be candid? What does it mean to be an optimist?
• Is this a “realistic” novel? (careful – depends on your definition of realism).
• How does Candide feel about The Baron and his home? What does he call it in Chapter 2? (“earthly paradise” 320) What gets him kicked out? What allusion is Voltaire making?
• Why focus on sexuality? Review spread of syphillis by Jesuit page 324. To what purpose
• Discuss passage on “free will” (326)
 

The Enlightenment

Go to groups

Humor
Look for examples of each of these in the text.
How does he make these things funny? After all, what’s funny about getting “four thousand strokes”? aesthetic distance, exaggeration, objectivity (treating people as objects),
Why does he use humor? Is it only for comic relief? To make the obvious seem strange. Use Bush’s speech in Miami – he tells Castro that he should “let the people’s vote count.” Much like good science fiction is

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After group work
The Enlightenment

Briefly look over the section on the Enlightenment or your reading notes. Given the introduction and what you’ve read so far of the novel, what reflections/rejections of enlightment ideals do you find? I’ll give you about 5 minutes or so.

Mocking the Epic by making the quest (for Cunegonde – cf. Beatrice in The Inferno) a satire.

Candide: Make me laugh

Group questions

  1. How does he make the horrors funny? After all, what’s funny about getting “four thousand strokes”? Why do we laugh at these things. Choose two incidents, and explain.
  2. Okay, so why? Why does he use humor? Why not treat these horrific events seriously? Is he trivializing these horrors? Explain with quotes please.
  3. Consider this comment by the Russian critic Mikhil Bakhtin. After noting that festive humor is directed at the powerful, he adds
    it is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed. This is one of the essential differences of the people’s festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. . . . The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it” (Bakhtin Rabelais 12)
    Is this true in Candide? Does the narrator “belong” in the world of the text? Is he laughing at or with the reader/people?
  4. Two part question on Pope v. Voltaire: Does Voltaire believe “whatever is, is right”? Offer specific examples and explanations of how those examples prove your point (yes, you need page numbers). For Voltaire, what are “the ways of God to man”?
  5.  A few on Eldorado: a) How is Eldorado different from Europe? b) What does Eldorado symbolize? c) why do they leave?
     

Class questions

  1. From list of what Voltaire is satirizing (I’ll assign two or three), find examples and prepare to explain them
  2. How does Abigal’s philosophy “but always I loved life” (337) play out in the novel?
  3. Why the travel around the world? Why not just confine the actions to Germany?
  4. While Voltaire is relentlessly satirical, there are some positive characters/actions in the text. List at least two and answer the following: What are they and from what does this goodness stem? What does this suggest about Voltaire’s view of the world?
  5. What’s worse in this novel, reality or denying reality? Find examples to prove your point.
  6. Of course, the final garden. Pessimistic or optimistic?
  7. We discussed realism a bit at the beginning of the class: now let’s look at the main characters and discuss whether they are meant as realistic characters or as symbolic characters.
  8. What are some things that Voltaire is satirizing in this novel? Let’s make a list
    War 1549
    Religion 1549-50 (but Anabaptist 50), 1555 inquisition, 1561, 1564 muslims, 1570
    Love/romance 1551 (pangloss/story of Paquette)**
    Royalty 1581 (how they greet the Eldoradean king) 1607 (deposed kings)
    Capitalism/Slavery 1583 (that’s the price of eating sugar
    Art/aesthetic/cultivated taste 1591, 1603
     
  9. Why three gardens represent?
  10.  What is the purposes of the coincidences? Do they seem to “fit” the tone of the novel? Why or why not? Providence?
  11. Does human nature change in different parts of the world?
  12. Why does Voltaire note that in Eldorado, the natives cannot leave (347)? What does this suggest?
  13. What seems to hold together the society in Eldorado? What do they seem to value above all? How does this fit in with Voltaire’s views and his own culture?
  14. In the final chapter, why doesn’t the farm work at first? Does it work in the end? How can you tell?
  15. Why include the Jacques the anabaptist (322)?
     

Rousseau

Print out revised course schedule below as well as test/study sheet on test2.docWe move from the Enlightenment, which stressed what? reason as a way to solve problems  to the Romantic age.

What do you associate with Romanticism? 

The 6 "I's" Imagination, Intuition, (anti)-Industrialism, iconoclasm (seeks to overthrow traditions, institutions and beliefs), Individualism, Innocence (emphasis on the child).

 

Review time

Get students to bring up characteristics of

Enlightenment (16th century) and Romantic (17th century)

 

Romanticism

  1.  First two paragraphs: count personal pronouns.  What is the emphasis here? 

  2. Notice comparison made here: on “the Day of Judgment . . . .[he will stand before God and say] I have unveiled my inmost self even as Thou hast seen it, O Eternal Being” (429)

  3. Let's mark the word "passion" in the text and see how Rousseau seems to define it.  the senses is the emphasis

  4. “I had conceived nothing, but felt everything” (430).  “Conceive” here meaning primarily thought. 

  5. Connect with Intimations “Would anyone believe that I, an old dotard, eaten up by cares and troubles, sometimes find myself weeping like a child, when I mumble one of the those little airs in a voice already broken and trembling?” (430)

  6. How does Rousseau judge reason?

  7. Where does imagination come in for Rousseau?

  8.  What about the other "I's"? Nature (435)

  9.  Rousseau is always telling you how unique he is, (see 429) stress on individualism, but does he change in the text (see 1,2 on 429, 32)

  10.  What are his views on education? What does he emphasize?

  11. What seems to be the focus

  12. Odd title: why choose “Confessions” – what are the connotations and denotations of the word.  (cf. Saint Augustine’s Confessions R. is making an obvious allusion [catholic country] Book of saints as a model of life.  Also, confessions of sins)

  13. If this is a “romantic” work, what are some of the traits of this movement?

  14. How does this contrast with Candide?  Think of specifics.

  15. What does the word “passions” mean?

 

Comment on dangers of romanticism

 From David Kirby’s essay “What Is a Critic?”

“Yet why do theorist and writers alike often seem preemptory, arrogant, and authoritarian?  The enemy is not Nazism but romanticism, of which Nazism is simply one particularly visible and repellent type.  When Hitler spoke of killing reason, when he boasted of marching to his goal like a somnambulist and intoxicated himself and his audiences with megalomaniacal dreams, he wore the Nazi uniform but he spoke a far older and more universal language.  In its positive form, romanticism can be liberating, transcendent, compassionate, generous.  But I speak here of romanticism’s dark side, its capacity for a self-worshipping ruthlessness.  As Bertrand Russell writers in this introduction to A History of Western Philosophy, “Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars.  The typical romantic removes the bars ad enjoys the magnificent leaps with which the tiger annihilates the sheep.  He exhorts men to imagine themselves tigers, and when he succeeds the results are not wholly pleasant” (126)

Kirby, David.  What Is a Book?. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 2002.