CL 222 : Topics in Classics / CO 220: Topics in Comparative Literature
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
Since the beginning of time, humans have been searching into the nature of the soul, its life and its meanings. Starting from the Greeks, this course seeks to discover how the concept of “soul” is understood, and how its life is conceived. We will explore the roots of these questions in ancient Greek epic, drama and philosophy, how these answers transform in medieval and renaissance literature, and how modernity offers strikingly new answers to them. One unit. Dobson.
READINGS
When Plato and Sophocles initiated their inquiries into the nature of the human psyche, they discovered that the soul could become more or less alive, more or less capable of actualizing itself or being fragmented in competing factions that diminished the soul’s liveliness. Ever since, philosophers, theologians, essayists, poets, playwrights, and novelists have asked what kind of life is the most alive life and
what most injures the soul’s ability to live fully. Possible common texts for the course: Presocratic philosophers, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Symposium and Republic, Sophocles Oedipus Cycle, Aristotle’s On the Soul (De Anima), Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, Neoplatonic writers such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola’s On the Dignity of Man; Goethe’s Faust, Franklin’s Autobiography, Emerson’s Essays, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These texts offer some of the most profound answers to how the soul can achieve its greatest life and will act as a template for the exploration of themes in the Newberry library’s collection.
THE RESEARCH PROJECTS
Possible areas for student explorations: Almost any of the great literary thinkers from antiquity through the twentieth century, American slave writings, Native American literature, the history of dissonance in music, travel/adventure literature, the American transcendentalists who locate the liveliest life in nature, and 19th/20th century urban literature which locates the city as the source of life rather than its diminishment. These topics draw not only on the special collections of the Newberry but also on its general collection of original texts by significant authors and scholarship on those texts. This general collection is often overlooked when the emphasis is put on the special collections, but for a number of great literary and philosophical figures, the Newberry is simply superb.
Interested? Email Marcia Dobson for more information.