Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores the mutual constitution of modernity in North and South. May focus on modernism and its enemies, case studies of alternative modernities, or the pre-modern in discourses of the modern and anti-modern.

COURSE DETAILS:

Topic: The Song of the Self: Modernity’s Existential Crisis

This course asks whether is there a single stream of existential doubt running through world cultures, and examines how such a question might be challenged through 19th Century European explorations of the topic.  Yet existentialism has long been understood in different ways – as a classical philosophical theory concerning the freedom of the self, as an artistic style, and, especially in modernity, as a corrective to ideas of individual responsibility & self-control.  As we shall see via two of Catullus’s odes from the 1st Century BCE, the burdens of selfhood have always been a feature of literary works.  From the wanderings of ancient epic heroes, to the global quandaries and ethical questionings of our own era, we have never stopped exploring what it means to have individual agency.   As a means of tracking this longer history of existential doubt in modernity, each of our course texts foregrounds a human individual whose tragic sense of responsibility in the world threatens to unravel his or her ties to social & cultural understandings.  We begin with selected passages from Kierkegaard, the modern western initiator of profound doubts concerning the freedom of the self, and then focus on Dostoevsky’s great novel of the struggles between consciousness & conscience.  We close by contemplating the global literary inheritance of existentialism through two modernist short stories & two recent novellas.  We will also view a broad selection of films, photographs, and paintings.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: