Spring

Do you believe that you are a good person and, if so, why are you good? This course will investigate the connections between personal intentions to be a "good person" and the fear of punishment. What do we owe each other as ethical actors? Do the intentions of our actions matter or only the results of our actions? How can one be good in an increasingly complicated web of intersecting needs, social developments, and understandings of morality? This course will examine conceptions of hell, eternal punishment, and justice in a variety of religious traditions. In addition to reading authors such as Dante and John Milton, students will critically engage The Good Place, a sitcom which tackles deep questions of faith, morality, and the complexity of the human person. We will think through competing understandings of justice (retributive, distributive, and restorative) alongside our individual beliefs surrounding fairness and deservingness. No prior knowledge of religious studies or ethics is expected.

What separates love from lust? How do our erotic desires and sexual practices intersect with our beliefs? This interdisciplinary class explores these questions in conversation with foundational thinkers from the Islamic tradition alongside insights from feminist and queer theory. We will delve into questions on the relationship between romantic, familial, and divine love; gender, sexuality, and the body; and Orientalism and the politics of reading desire cross-culturally. Exploring a diverse set of primary sources that range from the Qur'ān to Rūmī's Masnāvī to contemporary Bollywood, we will encounter different representations of love, desire, and sexuality in religious and philosophical discourses, literary representations, and visual media. We will examine not only how these representations reflect different historical norms, but also how and to what extent texts and images can inform or impact the norms of their contexts as well. No prerequisite knowledge of the topics or time periods discussed is needed, and students will have the opportunity over the course of the class to develop a project that relates our content to their own interests.

Two major positions in German philosophical aesthetics of the 20th century will be considered in detail: 1) the ontological-hermeneutic theory advanced by Martin Heidegger; 2) the dialectical-critical theory developed by Theodor W. Adorno. Primary readings will be Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art and selections from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. In addition, selected shorter pieces by the two authors will be studied, with a special emphasis on their work on lyric poetry. The seminar will also consider contributions by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Georg Lukács. The course seeks to develop an understanding of the conceptual foundation of each of the two philosophical positions. Particular topics to be considered: a) the nature of artistic presentation (Darstellung); b) the nature of artistic truth; c) the historical character of art; d) the political significance of art; e) the relation of art to philosophy.

When somebody tells us about the nature of God or the gods, about what such beings want from us, about our experiences before this life or our destinies after it-why should we believe them? With equal and opposite force, why shouldn't we believe them? Are the standards of acceptable belief entirely independent of what we're told by religious authorities, or is it impossible to arrive at any such standards without presuming something we've been told? When confronted with diverse claims about the divine, should we try to ascertain which ones are true, should we combine or harmonize them in some way, or should we dismiss the entire conversation as wrongheaded? In this course, we'll think through these questions with the help of influential texts drawn from the Buddhist, Hindu, Platonic, and classical Chinese traditions.

The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible (KJV) set off a series of events and texts dedicated to the great influence of this literary classic-a vernacular English Bible from 1611. What is it about the KJV that has so obsessed readers and writers? How has it become part of and affected world literature? Are there competing ways of conceiving the biblical text in English literature? In this course, we will trace some of the KJV's thematic and stylistic influences in global Anglophone literature; sometimes we will deal with direct allusion and rewriting, and other times we will study the possibilities of more tenuous links. In parallel to this work, we will problematize the KJV's astounding centrality by: examining some pre-KJV literature and alternative early- modern and 20th century translations (particularly as these intersect with Jewish tradition); attending to subversive and postcolonial literary uses of the translation; and close-reading the political and ideological motivations behind certain forms of critical adulation. Texts examined may include works by authors such as George Peele, William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Zora Neale Hurston, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

What makes us human? What is our place in the cosmos? What common condition unites us as a species across race, gender, and ethnicity? In this course, we will explore these questions through the lens of twentieth-century German thinkers who placed the human being at the center of philosophical inquiry. Seeking an alternative to both religious and scientific accounts, the philosophers Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, and Helmut Plessner developed new conceptions of the human that sought to do justice to both our spiritual and our biological being. We will take an historical approach to this intellectual movement, considering how philosophers such as Herder, Kant, and Nietzsche laid the groundwork for a reevaluation of who we are. In the conviction that literature also plays a vital role in formulating a philosophical anthropology, we will also consider several poets, in particular Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. All texts will be read in English translation.

The course will examine the long history of parrhesia, the Greek term for free and fearless speech, from ancient Athens to its current renaissance through the rediscovery by Michel Foucault. Focusing on the relation of truth and discourse, the course will consider not only the extraction of truth as a form of subjection to disciplinary power but also acts of telling truth to power as a practice of self- formation and exercise of freedom. Parrhesia implies a relation between the human self and the act of truth-telling that is suffused with interesting political, philosophical, and ethical possibilities, which students will be encouraged to explore. The course will begin by reviewing Foucault's final lectures on parrhesia and "the courage of truth." It will then examine some of the ancient Greek and Christian texts that Foucault analyzed. It will go on to consider early modern instances of parrhesia (e.g. Galileo and Descartes) and will conclude by surveying relatively recent versions (e.g. Greta von Thunberg and James Comey, JD'85), including contemporary feminist and queer practices of parrhesia. Lectures and discussions in English. No prerequisites.

In 1836, at the age of 26, Margaret Fuller began teaching the great works of German Romanticism to students at Amos Alcott's radically progressive Temple School in Boston. Fuller's passion for the German Romantics and their propagation in America is representative of the profound importance that the "American Transcendentalists" (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) attributed to German literature and its potential to shape American culture and values. In this course, we will explore the elective affinities between German Romanticism and its American counterpart, tracing the ways in which the two traditions mutually illuminate each other. Each unit will pair one major German and one major American text or artwork. Themes / pairings include: gender and mythology in Novalis' fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Fuller's fairy tales; spiritual landscapes in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the Hudson River School; slavery and abolition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience;" exemplarity and individualism in Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Nietzsche's "Schopenhauer as Educator."

Recently republished in 2022, Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 best-seller The Oppermanns depicts a Jewish family who grapple with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Like many at the time, the Oppemanns think that the regime will be short-lived, but Feuchtwanger’s prescient novel anticipates the entrenchment of Nazi power and the creeping curtailment of Jewish life in Germany with uncanny accuracy—from the thugs attacking individuals to the Ministry of Propaganda’s demonization of Jewish Germans in mass media, via the enforced “Aryanization” of businesses required to employ non-Jewish managers. Discussion will focus on Feuchtwanger’s nuanced portrayal of the distinct ways in which family members react to these assaults, supplemented by historical texts, including the analysis of Nazi language (1946) by Victor Klemperer, a Jewish-German survivor, and documents in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook

This course will consider the major poems of Baudelaire as well as the chaotic political landscape that he inhabited.