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 Brandon Bourgeois, Department of Classics

It is nothing new to say that conceptions of the ‘classical’ have been deeply complicit in the creation and perpetuation of modern structures of violence and oppression (‘-isms’ such as colonialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, etc.). So what does classics (traditionally, the study and promotion of ‘Graeco-Roman’ and—at times—Egyptian antiquity) have to do with intersectionality (i.e., the understanding that we simultaneously occupy multiple, overlapping, and complexly-interacting social positions)? What relation does Plato, ancient Greek drama, and early-Christian asceticism have with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Huey Newton, Womanism, LGBTQAI+ rights, the Chicanx movement, and Black Lives Matter? This course introduces students to modern classical reception and the history and critical perspectives of social-justice movements in the United States. By using a variety of media and disciplinary approaches, we will study the little-publicized history of how classical antiquity has been received among structurally oppressed and marginalized peoples in the United States, from the country’s founding to the present day. Along this timeline, we will see how the classics has perennially served as a site of political contestation: how normative conceptions of the ‘classical’ have been used to underwrite exclusion and oppression; and how a variety of progressive and radical U.S. leaders, activists, artists, and advocates of social-justice movements have in turn subverted, resisted, rejected, and reimagined the ‘classical’ in the name of political insurgency and social uplift.

Texts (subject to change)

Luis Alfaro. The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro: Electricidad; Oedipus El Rey; Mojada.

Robin Lewis. Voyage of the Sable Venus: and Other Poems.

Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo.

Sophocles. Theban Plays.

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.