Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Seminar on a topic in World Literature. This course may be repeated for credit when different topics are offered.

COURSE DETAILS:

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. If the historical record shows that 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, as an exploration of modern ideas of responsibility and self-control – our conversations will ask what it means to have individual agency in a capricious world.  

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 and cultural understandings. We begin with selected passages from the modern western initiators of doubt concerning the freedom of the self, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and then focus on Dostoevsky’s great novel of the struggles between consciousness and conscience. We close by contemplating the global literary inheritance of existentialism through two 20th Century novellas, as well as the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and, especially, Albert Camus. We will also view a broad selection of films, photographs, and paintings.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: