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
********
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
Class questions
Rousseau
We 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
First two paragraphs: count personal pronouns. What is the emphasis here?
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)
Let's mark the word "passion" in the text and see how Rousseau seems to define it. the senses is the emphasis
“I had conceived nothing, but felt everything” (430). “Conceive” here meaning primarily thought.
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)
How does Rousseau judge reason?
Where does imagination come in for Rousseau?
What about the other "I's"? Nature (435)
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)
What are his views on education? What does he emphasize?
What seems to be the focus
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)
If this is a “romantic” work, what are some of the traits of this movement?
How does this contrast with Candide? Think of specifics.
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.