CORE 102: Culture and Values

Professor David Albertson, School of Religion

Around 600 BCE, the poet Sappho wrote: “Eros shook my mind / Like a mountain wind falling on oak trees” (Frag. 47). The mysterious experience of love has been central to western art and literature, but also to philosophy and religion. Across different epochs, from ancient Greeks to medieval monks to early modern authors, most western thinkers have shared the conviction that eros (Greek: erós) conceals profound secrets about the nature of human and divine beings. But while modernity has tended to separate rationality from irrational desire, premodern (and some postmodern) authors insist on the necessary interplay of love and reason. For them, eros precedes and exceeds reason, since to philosophize is to love wisdom, that is, to maximize desire.

For almost a thousand years, academic philosophy has attended to reason and minds more than passions and bodies. Meanwhile the unique rationality of eros has been preserved in art and religion: in poetry, drama, dialogue, myth, letter, memoir, and commentary. The questions posed by love are complex: Does eros have its own rationality? Does it propel the soul toward the divine? Are there many kinds of love or just one? How does love alter the boundaries of the self? Is sexual desire a property of body or soul? How is it that love is both joyful and painful?

We’ll first survey some landmarks in Greek tragedy, Roman erotic poetry, and Greek philosophy. Then we’ll study the special contributions of religion, especially Christianity’s influential ambivalence about desire. Finally, we’ll explore the fate of romantic love in early modernity and recent philosophies of eros in late modernity. Along the way we’ll discuss the function of writing, writing out of love and about love. As Plato recognized, the gap between feeling and describing love drives the lover to experiment with language: words of seduction, confession, and praise.

Texts (subject to change)

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions.

Euripides. Euripides V.

Hadewijch. The Complete Works.

Plato. Plato on Love.

Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

—. Antony and Cleopatra.

Sophocles. Sophocles I.

Other short selections will be circulated as PDFs: Song of Songs, Sappho, Ovid, Plotinus, Origen of Alexandria, Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of St. Victor, Dante Alighieri, Georges Bataille, and Jean-Luc Marion.

Professor Stefano Rebeggiani, Department of Classics

This course investigates the theme of mortality in connection with art and the creative desire across several centuries. It looks at major works of literature: the epic tales of Homer, the Roman epic of Virgil, the medieval cosmological poem of Dante (Divine Comedy); the modern mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien (The Silmarillion; The Lord of the Rings), and the masterpiece short story collection by Isaac Babel (Red Cavalry).

“Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine…With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it.”

With these words, Tolkien described the major concern of his epic imaginarium, the set of tales he developed in his three major works, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. Twenty-seven centuries earlier, Homer centered his epic poems on the same core theme. The Iliad opens with Achilles’ dilemma in the face of his own mortality. Should he choose a short life full of glory or a long life in obscurity? The poem’s close highlights the same theme: king Priam persuades Achilles to relent and grant him the body of his son Hector by making him reflect on the fragility of the human condition, of which both he and Achilles partake. Virgil’s Aeneid celebrates the eternal power of Rome, while highlighting the fragility of human achievement. Virgil has his hero (Aeneas) descend to the underworld to grasp the ultimate meaning of life in the face of death, but also to reflect on the power of poetry to make things immortal. Dante’s poem takes its cue from Virgil to take his readers on an extensive journey to the underworld. His art sheds light on the tragedy of human experience on earth, on the short time we are allowed to make choices that stay with us for eternity, but the underworld is also a place to reflect on art, where Dante encounters the great artists and writers of the past and negotiates his place in the literary tradition. Babel’s Red Cavalry brings a young artist into the inferno of the Russo-Polish war of the 1920s, where he reflects on the meaning of life, the role of art, and the place of beauty in the face of horror and violence.

Texts (subject to change)

Isaac Babel. Red Cavalry.

Dante. Inferno.

Homer. Iliad.

Virgil. Aeneid.

Other readings to be distributed in class.

Professor Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, Departments of Comparative Literature and Latin American and Iberian Cultures

Living in what Guy Debord has called “the society of the spectacle,” we have grown accustomed to the idea that political power is intimately bound with the antics of theatrical performance. But the relationship between theater (and, more broadly, performance) and politics has been central to the creation and distribution of political power in the west since well before the advent of the modern media. And nowhere in our political regimes is the relation between politics and performance more spectacularly self-evident than in the rituals that accompany the exercise of sovereign power, whether this power is vested in a monarch, a president, or a parliament. From the media frenzy that follows the coronation of a new European monarch to the comedic scene of POTUS pardoning a turkey for Thanksgiving, sovereigns wield a power that exceeds their strict juridical function, namely, the power to capture our political imaginations by taking the center stage of society. But what is the source of this strange power that seems to give rulers control over other bodies and other wills? And how can this power be transformed, resisted, or even challenged?

This course addresses these questions through a reading of selected texts from the western tradition of literature and political philosophy. How have political philosophers conceived of the sovereign? What kind of powers or attributes do they ascribe to this figure? Which arguments have they provided to justify or challenge the power that the sovereign exerts over a polity? Conversely, how has literature put sovereignty on stage? Can literary texts provide us a way of both understanding and resisting the logic that grants some human being, because of their political status, power over life and death?

Texts (subject to change)

Hans Christian Andersen. “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Jean Bodin. On Sovereignty.

Giannina Braschi. United States of Banana.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Life Is a Dream.

Dante. Monarchy.

Enūma Eliš.

Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo.

Alfred Jarry. Ubu the King.

Plato. Statesman.

Shakespeare. Richard III.

Sophocles. Antigone.