Comparative Literature 100, Spring 2010

David Walter

Philosophic Fantasies.

This class looks critically at the moments where philosophy intersects with narrative, myth, and figuration. Where does philosophy fall back on the imagination in order to explore its principles? Conversely, how do writers and artists borrow from philosophic ideas to construct their imagined worlds?

Starting with the Pre-Socratics and Plato, moving on to Descartes and the Enlightenment skeptics, and finishing with a treatment of Existentialism and Phenomenology, we will examine the role of the imagination in debates about perception, reality, and “thinghood.” In the course of this historical survey of thought, we will study works of literature and art that reflect back on the boundaries of the philosophical.

Required Books:  

A Presocratics Reader, Patricia Curd (Ed.)

Plato, Last Days of Socrates

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Freud, Dora

Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

Required Films/TV:

“Vertigo” (Hitchcock)

“Le Jetée” (Marks)

“Star Trek,” selected episodes

Reader:

Euclid, Elements, “Definitions”; Homer, The Odyssey (from Book 10); Vergil, The Aeneid (from Book 6); Ovid (from The Metamorphoses); Lucretius (from On the Nature of Things); Dante (from Purgatorio); Newton, “General Scholium”; Locke, “A Letter to the Bishop of Worchester”; Berkeley, “On the Principles of Knowledge”; Shelley, (from Frankenstein, Chapter 11); Genesis 22 and Kierkegaard’s notebooks; Kafka, “Three Parables”; Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”; Heidegger, “The Thing”; Philip K. Dick (stories); J.G. Ballard, “The Subliminal Man.”