Evil: The Literary Question of the Human

Catalog description

This course is designed to explore the relationship between ethics, politics, and aesthetics through careful attention to literary explorations of the complex problem of evil in a range of literary and visual texts including genres from myth through poetry and drama to painting and film. We will read and study excerpts of works from Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, through Shakespeare, Cervantes, Maria de Zayas, Leibniz, Milton, Hieronymous Bosch, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. The recurring questions for us along the way will be about the role of reading and interpretation in relation to the problem of evil and what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the richness of the real. (ENGL-PRE)