Masters and Servants

Catalog description

We will consider the relationship between servants and masters as portrayed in fiction and films. We shall examine the basic relation of servitude to sovereignty, extrapolating to the broader power dynamics of two-person relationships. Beginning with the Hegelian dialect of the master and the servant, and building as well on a philosophical framework provided by Nietzche, Kojeve and Bataille, we shall look at the complexities of the relationship between masters and servants, exploring the psychological, social and ethical dimensions of two-person relationships that value each person differently. We shall focus on issues of class and power and look at literature and film in which there are explorations of several complicated manifestations of servitude and mastery: overlaps into gender power dynamics and fetishism, power dynamic reversals both to comic and tragic effect, and questions of boundaries and violation of social propriety and human communication. Core texts will include work from Ishiguru, Wodehouse, D.H. Lawrence, Miabeau, Richardson, Bronë, and Stanley Crawford, and film texts will include Joseph Losey's The Servant and Luis Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid .