Philosophy and Literature

Catalog description

Philosophy and Literature (3) This course serves as an intensive engagement with existentialist philosophy and its relation to literature and aesthetics as it was developed from its beginnings with Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky to Beauvoir. The course works through the basic existentialist concepts of freedom, isolation, meaninglessness, and death, and emphasizes the different ways in which philosophy and literature have treated these themes. Moreover, the course also works through the themes of absurdity, alienation, and the relations of art and literature to scientific understanding. In order to provide a comprehensive account of these topics, students explore the two areas within existentialism itself that Sartre referred to as atheistic and religious existentialism. Students explore the general philosophical, and specifically existential, significance of the themes of freedom, finitude, and meaninglessness, and how these themes were developed in the philosophy and literature of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Questions explored include what role the Other plays in the understanding and concept of selfhood, and what is meant by authentic subjectivity. The course emphasizes research into particular problems; students develop their own ideas and arguments in short essays and a longer final essay.