Reconnecting with the Other in Time of Trauma: Literature as the Antidote to Individualism

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course explores how, from the ancient Greeks to our own time, literature has expressed our relationship with the Other as a way to make sense of and face life's limitations and death. By unsettling our "default" attitudes of individualism, literature's powerfully communitarian nature reconnects us with the search for reality's ultimate meanings--whatever we may call them--a search that is religious by nature. By way of analyzing major figures both from the Italian (including Dante, Petrarch, and Pasolini) and American (O'Connor, Baldwin, and Carver, among others) literary traditions, as well as recent contemporary literary trends, including postcolonial and migration literature (Hosseini), this course will allow the students to think about literature as a laboratory of a unitary, essentially religious, vision of knowledge and as a fundamental tool for sparking one's intellectual, aesthetic, and social interests.