01 MW7 CAC 15067 JAGER HH-A2
Existentialism
This course will serve as an introduction to existentialism, a literary and philosophical movement that dominated postwar intellectual culture in the middle of the twentieth century, and—as we will see—continues to resonate in our own day. At its heart, existentialism asks that we attend to the remarkable fact of existence itself: we exist, we are here in this time and this place. What will be our response? Answering that question led the existentialists to develop some of the most famous concepts of the twentieth century: bad faith, authenticity, commitment, despair, the abyss, the situation, the look. In this course we will read extensively in the works of the existentialism’s central figures: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. We will also explore its beginnings in the thought of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, trace its development in the anti-colonial writings of Frantz Fann, and follow it into more recent novels, films, and music.
This course falls under the “theories and methods” designation, so roughly half of our time will be spent on philosophical texts, and half on literary texts. The philosophical reading list will include Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), and major selections from Being and Nothingness (Sartre) and The Second Sex (de Beauvoir). For literature, we will read The Stranger (Camus), No Exit (Sartre), A Girl’s Story (Annie Ernaux), and Diary of a Bad Year (J. M. Coetzee). Films by Terrence Malick (Knight of Cups), and Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker), and music by Kendrick Lamar will round out our survey of this “philosophy of existence.”
Requirements: active participation, 2 in-class exams, final exam, and several medium-length papers or projects.