The modern world abounds with few things more numerous than self-conscious (and often disconcerting) pronouncements about itself. Whatever the value or veracity of these designations might be, they arguably share one prevailing aspect—the sense of an accelerating current of history strong enough to carry off both individuals and societies with it, depositing them on the shores of “modernity.” In this course, we will try to delve into these currents to recover that which often escapes the grand narratives of social and political change: the lone individual who, in the course of their childhood, adolescence and adulthood, must (often unwillingly) confront problems much larger than themselves. Reading along a trail of crumbs left behind by some of the era’s most sensitive writers—including Leo Tolstoy, Erich Maria Remarque, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Said, Fyodor Dostoevsky and others—we will think about what the modern world demands from the individual, its attitudes toward disobedience, and finally, what possibilities and consolations remain to us for sincerity and ethical adulthood.
