Summer Classics 2010

Week III
July 25- 30, 2010

 

William Shakespeare | Measure for Measure
Judith Adam and Warren Winiarski

Measure for Measure is one of the more puzzling and difficult to categorize of Shakespeare’s plays. The severely moral young Angelo is entrusted by the absent Duke with the task of governing loose moraled Vienna and enforcing its strict chastity laws, but he soon discovers his own unlawful desires and the dark lengths to which they will lead him. The play is a comedy, but one that explores some of the darker aspects of human nature before finally reaching its “happy ending” and the anticipated marriages of its various characters. We will attempt a careful reading of the play in an effort to untangle some of the difficulties that it presents.

 

Cormac McCarthy | Blood Meridian
 Jan Arsenault and David McDonald

Blood Meridian is a novel which allows us to ponder questions about the nature and “naturalness” of violence. It destabilizes us with its violence, bloodshed, brutality and cruelty and asks us to view these apart from moral categories. We delve into it in order to see if we can confront the depths of depravity that, in fact, seem to be part of the ongoing human experience. This aspect of our individual and collective experience is rarely taken up so directly, yet it deserves our careful scrutiny. Cormac McCarthy gives us an epic tale of the mid-19th century American Southwest from which to approach these questions. This offering comes with a strong warning: The violence depicted in this novel is graphic, explicit and can be deeply disturbing. We would not wish for anyone to join this seminar without knowing this.

 

Honoré de Balzac | Le Père Goriot
 Michael Bybee and Arcelia Rodriguez

Le Père Goriot is perhaps the most renowned work in Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy and forms part of the scenes from private life within his greater study of morals. Through this important novel we will attempt to understand what Balzac meant when he wrote, in the preface to the entire Human Comedy, that the first chimeric idea for the entire work came from a“comparison between humanity and animality.” The scenes from private life, such as those we will encounter in Le Père Goriot, represent “infancy, adolescence and their errors.”

 

Homer | The Iliad
 Andy Kingston and Walter Sterling

Homer’s Iliad can stake a claim to be the foundational work of western literature. The poem offers us a great epic of the Trojan War. Its ambition and scope are greater still: a comprehensive reflection on love, friendship, the status of justice in the world, the limits of the value of glory, the tension between the domestic and the political and the relation between the human and the divine. Over-arching all of this is the problem of mortality, the knowledge of our impending death and the gravity this gives to human life and action. Our discussions will range over this rich array of themes.

 

Adam Smith and Karl Marx | The Wealth of Nations and The Flourishing of Humans
 Lauren Brubaker and Jessica Jerome

Adam Smith and Karl Marx are widely heralded (or despised) for their founding of competing economic systems. Yet they were also interesting philosophical thinkers whose texts spanned not only classic economic categories—the division of labor, wealth, value and the role of markets—but the ideas of human nature and human happiness as well. We will read selections from Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments and Marx’s Das Kapital and early philosophical essays. What assumptions do they share and where exactly do they disagree? Simplistic assumptions rarely survive direct encounters with great thinkers.

 

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