Death Considered

Description

Art lives only on the constraints it imposes on itself; it dies of all others. -Albert Camus

Scheherazade, who told the Sultan stories in order to live another day, would agree. She had to get the words right, or else. This program considers the words—the forms—writers and philosophers use when they breathe life into the problem of human death.

The inescapability of death can concentrate the mind. The contemporary philosopher Odo Marquard argues that from the facts of life's brevity and death's finality it follows that absolute personal choices are senseless. From other philosophers come perplexing questions: Given that the human being knows he or she will die, how does he or she know this? Is it even possible to imagine one's own death? If my death is not one of my experiences, in what sense is it mine? Some would answer: in the same sense that your birth is yours. But what sense is that?

In this program we will read the following works of prose fiction and philosophy: Melville, Moby-Dick; Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov; Tolstoi, Anna Karenina; Hawthorne, Tales; James, Portrait of a Lady; Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Mann, The Magic Mountain; Conrad, Lord Jim; Faulkner, Light in August; Camus, The Plague; Thoreau, Walden; and Marquard, In Defense of the Accidental.

Death Considered is for the intellectually curious, diligent student eager to practice the craft of close reading. There will be weekly in-class exams and seminars on the literary works, exercises in conceptual analysis, seminar reports on authors' lives and times, one essay on an assigned topic and a comprehensive final exam.