STUDENT-LED COLLOQUIUM: LITERATURE AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Course Description

From Aristotle’s treatise on what constitutes “the literary” in Poetics to the poststructuralists exploring their philosophical theories through literary analysis, the fields of Philosophy and Literature have practically always been mutually constituted. The need for the allegorical and the example has made literature ripe for philosophical examples. Likewise, literature’s often-needed requirement for finding meaning or grasping the feeling of the age has made philosophy a helpful tool for elucidation. Both often seek to provide a mirror to our lives and, in so doing, help give directions for understanding both historical and modern forms of life.

Often, connecting these two fields takes the form of pairing certain philosophical hermeneutics with a specific text or series of texts, using the form of analysis to uncover some hidden, latent meaning within the text. The focus of this course will not be that. Rather, the aim is to see how explore how reading literature philosophically and reading philosophy can do things for us. Putting this in the form of a thesis question for the course: how does being in a dialogue with a text reveal what we as readers find important, truthful, and meaningful (as well as the inverse)? Navigating this will also require recognizing how we may fail to acknowledge certain aspects of a text while reading it. These two principles are, I think, not necessarily the most explicitly stated in either field, though perhaps they should be. The first half of the course will cover reading philosophy literarily. The Philosopher Stanley Cavell states in the beginning of his work, The Claim of Reason, that he seeks to read philosophy as a series of texts. Using this quote as a guiding principle, I would like to see what exactly reading philosophy outside of the realm of argument does for the practice of the field—how it reopens those whom the field traditionally accepts for new interpretation. Using the tools learned in this first half of the course, we will transition to reading literature as philosophy. This is not to do the inverse of the aim of the first half of the course, (read literature in the way of “arguing claims”), but rather look at the ways that reading texts and gauging how we react to them can help us to come to better understandings of ourselves and our world. Cavell ends The Claim of Reason by asking if one can think about the characters of Othello as philosophers. This sort of question will guide the second half of the course.

Class will be structured as having both a lecture and a seminar included, the first 20 minutes spent on the former and the rest of the time spent on the latter. Attendance is encouraged, and if attending, having done the reading will be mandatory. The midterm will consist of an oral exam on a topic of the student’s interest, and the final will be a written exploration of this topic (or another if the student explicitly informs me of a switch).

This is a student-led colloquium led by Ethan Woelbern under the supervision of James Donelan.