ENG 300PTales of Toxic Masculinity

Catalog

ENG 300P Tales of Toxic Masculinity - This course investigates the psychological, philosophical, and cultural formation of the masculine through works of literature, drama, film, and television. Beginning from the widely felt moral urgency surrounding the phenomenon termed "toxic masculinity," it undertakes a historical, ethical, and ontological inquiry into the nature, formation, and distortion of the masculine. Topics include traditional constructions of the masculine and feminine; masculinity's relation to power, violence, humiliation, vulnerability, and care; and the transformation of paternal authority in the modern world. Central to this inquiry is the historical 'fall of the Absolute' in the West-the waning of God the Father as transcendent ground-and the crisis this loss precipitates for the masculine, left dangerously driven to embrace dubious symbolic substitutes for transcendence or to assume ultimacy for itself. To clarify this crisis, the inquiry draws on Jung's psychological conception of the anima and animus-the presence of ineradicable feminine and masculine psychic dimensions within every human being-to examine how patriarchal formations, intensified by the loss of transcendent authority, repress the feminine within the psyche and thereby contribute to misogynistic domination, violence, and broader forms of toxicity. At the same time, it asks whether a re-formed masculinity-grounded in finitude, relation, and care, and made possible through the acknowledgment and integration of the feminine (anima) within the human psyche- remains possible. Here the masculine and feminine are understood less as gendered identities than as fundamental orientations of being and knowing, capable of expression in any person, even as the West's radical patriarchal history has shaped the repression of the feminine and the distortion of the masculine into toxic extremities. SOME LIKELY WORKS: Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank; Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander; Peter Brooks, Lord of the Flies; Caryl Churchill, A Number and Top Girls; Alan Crosland, The Jazz Singer; Brian De Palma, Casualties of War; Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman; David Fincher, Fight Club; Contessa Gayles, "The Feminist in Cell Block Y"; Susan Glaspell, Trifles; Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Birthmark" and "Young Goodman Brown"; David Hwang, M. Butterfly; Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"; Sarah Jewett, "A White Heron"; L. Q. Jones, A Boy and His Dog; Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket; David Lynch, Blue Velvet; Terrence Mallick, Badlands; David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross; Edgar Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; Ridley Scott, Thelma & Louise; Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas; Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire; August Wilson, Fences. TV: Father Knows Best; The Wonder Years; Shameless. NOTE: I DO NOT ALLOW STUDENTS' USE OF LAPTOPS OR PHONES DURING CLASS.