Courses
Spring 2024 Courses
PRL 20804
Descartes and Pascal: Early Modern French Philosophy before 1700
John Waldrop
MW 2:00 - 3:15
The primary goal of the course is to introduce students to some of the central thinkers and historical controversies animating the French itellectual scene between the Reformation and the height of the enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Central authors include Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal; topics to be addressed include skepticism, natural philosophy, and rationalism, and the relationship of these to questions of morals, culture, and relgious belief, including divine grace and the role of religious institutions.
PRL 20806
Ethics and Religion
Kay Malte Bischof
TTH 2:00 - 3:15
From the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths and of Greek philosophy, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. In this class, we explore to what extent a secular ethical theory is possible. Reading range from antiquity to modernity, including Plato, Kant, Maimonides, Heidegger, and Simone Weil. these authors will help us answering questions, such as 'Do I need God's assistance to become a good person?', 'Does the normative power of the moral law require God's existence?' 'Does God need to reveal the moral law in order for me to know it?'
PRL 33122
African Literature and the Moral Imagination
Paulinus Odozor
TTH 9:30 - 10:45
To imagine is to form a mental concept of something which is not present to the senses. Imagination therefore deals with "framing". Like everyone else, Africans ponder over their condition and their world on the basis of their experience, history, social location and other realities which provide the "frame" through which they construct and address reality. In this course, through the study of some significant African literary works and some literary works about Africa we will study the self-perception of the African and the way the African has ethically viewed his/her reality and tried to grapple with it over a period of time (colonialism, post colonialism, apartheid) with regard to various issues on the continent (political challenges, religion, war and peace) and over some of the social questions (class, urbanization/ city life, sex and sexuality, relationship of the sexes), etc. We will read such authors as Joseph Conrad, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chimamanda Adichie, Syl Cheney-Coker, Tsitsi Dangaremga, Nawal El Sadawi, Ferdinand Oyono, and some others. Using these and many authors we will ask questions about what constitutes the moral imagination, how such an imagination is manifested in or apparent in the social, personal and relgious lives of the various African peoples or characters portrayed in these literary works; to what extent the moral sense has helped/conditioned or failed to influence the lives of these peoples and characters. We will also inquire into the extent and in what ways the writers in our selection have helped to shape the moral imagination of their people.
PRL 33125
Devotional Lyric: Wyatt to Watts
Susannah Monta
TR 9:30-10:45
In the wake of the Reformation-era's massive upheavals came the greatest flowering of devotional poetry in the English language. This body of literature offers its readers the opportunity to explore questions pertaining broadly to the study of lyric and the study of the relationships between religion and literature. Early modern devotional poetry oscillates between eros and agape, private and communal modes of expression, shame and pride, doubt and faith, evanescence and transcendence, mutability and permanence, success and failure, and agency and helpless passivity. It experiments with gender, language, form, meter, voice, song, and address. We'll follow devotional poets through their many oscillations and turns by combining careful close reading of the poetry with the study of relevant historical, aesthetic, and theological contexts. You'll learn to ready lyric poetry skillfully and sensitively, to think carefully about relationships between lyric and religion, and to write incisively and persuasively about lyric. Authors we'll read may include Thomas Brampton, Richard Maidstone, Francesco Petrarca (in translation), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, Mary Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Henry Constable, Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and the great hymn writer, Isaac Watts.
PRL 40823
Religion and Literature
Abigail Favale
MW 11:00 - 12:15
This course has as its central context the crisis of discursive authority in the modern period both subsequent and consequent to literature gaining its independence from Christianity and its central focus on the different attitudes literature takes towards Christianity on a spectrum that at one end is unrelentingly critical as anti-humanist and at the other affirming of Christianity rather than literature as the true humanism. The reading list includes Camus, Dante, Joyce, Dostoyevski, and Shelley.