Awakenings

Catalog description

Awakenings - Every life is marked by opportunities for heightened awareness, increased understanding. Circumstances - or our inner selves - call upon us to open our eyes, our minds, our hearts, our imaginations. These solicitations toward enlightenment, if we respond to them, can be beautiful, joy filled. But they can also be nearly intolerable. Some knowledge is hard to bear - so hard that the costs might well seem to outweigh the benefits. In this class, we will examine a number of texts, drawn from fictions to film, in which characters experience a moment of awakening, or in which it looks as though a given character should experience some form of awakening but doesn't. By doing so, we'll explore the dynamics of insight: the advantages and disadvantages of opening oneself to new ideas, new experiences, new sensation, new knowledge: the consequences, for good and ill, of failing or refusing to answer the call to wake up.