Close Encounters: Reflections on Literature through a Philosophical Lens

Catalog description

This course explores the meeting points of literature and philosophy through close readings of a variety of 20th and 21st century texts. Using both philosophical and literary perspectives, we will be examining works in four different genres – Poetry, Fiction, Autobiography/Memoir, and Film – in search of themes, ideas, plots, modes of representation, and aesthetic principles. By moving through analysis, interpretation and reflection, we will be exercising hermeneutics as the activity of informed and self-conscious reading and construction of meaning.