POWER AND PASSION:
From the Bible to Modernity
I-HUM 33B
Spring: Winter:
Helen Brooks Marsh McCall
Hrs: Wed 1:30-3:00; Thur 1:30-3:00 E-mail:
E-mail: hbrooks@stanford marsh.mccall@stanford
Phone: 723-0813
Many
of the most influential texts in literary history revolve around fundamental
issues of power and passion, played out by both literary and historical men and
women in remarkably gripping and unpredictable ways. In this winter/spring sequence, we will focus
on a series of great texts from the ancient to the modern worlds in which these
issues are instrumental in driving the texts.
The sequence consciously arranges the texts not only chronologically but
also by genre – epic, lyric, drama, philosophy, short story, the novel – in
order to explores how different genres may construct differently the complex
and shifting issues of power and passion.
And, in virtually every text that we treat in the sequence, gender roles
and gender conflicts, both human and divine, will receive close attention. How do power and passion stand in relation to
authority and specifically to male and female authorities? Are established views of the exercise of power
and passion challenged? What connections
exist between particular forms of thought and experience and the historical
milieus in which they appear?
Lectures are at 11:00 am on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. The seminar
meetings will begin on the first Tuesday.
During the spring quarter, students are required to write two papers,
the first, 4-5 pages, due Tuesday, April 27, and the second, 6-7 pages, due
Thursday, May 20. The final examination
is on Tuesday, June 8 at 7-10 PM, and may not be rescheduled.
Grades for the spring quarter
will be determined not only by the final examination and papers but also by
regular participation and consistent performance in the seminars. In determining the final course grade, the
various components of the course will be weighted as follows: seminar performance 25%; first paper 20%;
second paper 30%; final exam 25%.
Incompletes will not be given except for medical reasons or family
emergencies.
Course Coordinator:
Graduate Program in Humanities
Dan Turkeltaub danturk@stanford
Teaching Fellows:
Erin Ferris eferris@stanford
Fred Porta fporta@stanford
Dan Turkeltaub danturk@stanford
Teaching Interns: (Graduate Program in Humanities)
Nicolas Fernandez-Medina nicolasf@stanford
Joseph Sargent jsargent@stanford
Sean Wang syhw@stanford
Texts for Spring Quarter (Brooks):
Dante The Divine
Comedy: Hell (Inferno) tr. Sayers, Penguin
dePizan The Book of the City of
Ladies, tr. Richards, Persia Books
Machiavelli Selections from The Prince, tr.
Bergin (Photocopy)
Luther “The Bondage
of the Will”, tr. Dillenberger (Course Reader)
Marlowe
Doctor Faustus, Broadview Press
Montaigne
Selections from Essais, tr.
Frame (Course Reader)
Donne John Donne: Selected Poems,
Dover Press
Wroth
Selected Poems (Course Reader)
Shakespeare Othello, Signet (Penguin)
Joyce “The Dead” from Dubliners (Course
Reader)
Rich Adrienne Rich – “A
Valediction Forbidding Mourning” (Course Reader)
Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Signet (Penguin)
---------- Selected Art and Films
Course Reader: Sold at Stanford Book Store
Texts for Winter Quarter (McCall):
????? Genesis, tr. R. Alter (Norton)
????? Gilgamesh, tr. N. Sandars
(Penguin)
Homer Odyssey, tr. R. Fagles (Penguin)
Sappho et al. Lyric
poems, tr. D. Rayor (California)
Aeschylus Oresteia, tr.
R. Lattimore (Chicago)
Sophocles Antigone, tr.
D. Grene (Chicago)
Euripides Medea, tr.
E. Vermeule (Chicago)
Aristophanes Lysistrata, tr. A.
Sommerstein (Penguin)
Plato Symposium, tr. S. Benardete (Chicago)
Aristotle Nicomachean
Ethics, tr. M. Ostwald (Macmillan)
For Michel Foucault (in Discipline and
Punish), power is
more than
the repression of a dominant class over a subservient class, a “tool of a conspiracy.” Rather, it
is “a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens. Thus even a tyrannical aristocrat does not
simply wield power, for he is empowered by `discourses’—accepted ways of
thinking, writing,
and
speaking—and practices that amount to power.”
--Johanna Smith on
Michel Foucault
* * *
“The problem is often said to be our own `irrationality,’
our
sometimes extravagant but always vain desires and
expectations, our
sometimes uplifting but more often
disruptive and
destructive moods and emotions. The
problem, in
short, is our passions, those shortsighted and
self-indulgent
less-than-wholly-human lapses in our
objectivity and
knowledge of Reality….”
“Or, are the passions the central and defining roles in
our
lives, which have so long and persistently been denied….
[Should we] limit the pretensions of
`objectivity’ and
self-demeaning
reason which have exclusively ruled Western
philosophy,
religion, and science since the days of Socrates….
Is it that our passions constitute our
lives…that our
passions, and
our passions alone, provide our lives with
meaning?”
--Robert C. Solomon
Tuesday Mar 30 Introduction - Dante: Divine Comedy: Hell (Inferno)
Thursday April 1 Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy: Hell (13??-1321)
(See p. 138 (Signet): Schematic of Dante’s Hell and
Course Reader Material on Medieval Cosmology,
including John Donne’s Sermon on “Kings are Gods”).
Tuesday April 6
Dante: Divine Comedy: Hell and
Dante: Divine Comedy: Paradise (Paradiso),
Canto 33 (CR)
Thursday April 8 Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies (1405)
Boccaccio, fr Concerning Famous Women (CR)
Tuesday April 13 de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies
Thursday April 15 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1604)
Tuesday April 20 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
Calvin and Knox on “Predestination” (CR)
Pico Della Mirandola, fr “Oration on the Dignity of Man”
Thursday April 22 John Donne: “The Flea”; “Break of Day”;
fr “An Apology for Raymond Sebond”; fr Essais (CR)
(pub. 1580)
Tuesday
April 27 **FIRST PAPER DUE: 11:00 AM**
Donne: Holy Sonnet X: “Death be not proud”,
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
Adrienne Rich: “A Valediction Forbidding
Mourning” (CR) (1971)
Thursday
April 29 Lady Mary Wroth:
Ben Jonson: “Epigram CV” (CR)
Wroth: “Sonnet XV”; and “Sonnet XXVII” (CR)
Mannerist
and Baroque Art
Monday May 3 Film/Pizza
Night – 6:15PM – Bldg. 420-040
Tuesday May 4 William Shakespeare: Othello (1603-04)
Thursday May 6
Shakespeare: Othello
Rec: Madelon G. Sprengnether: “I wooed thee with
(In Signet edition of Othello, 188-210)
fr sixteenth century “Matrimonial Guidebooks” (CR)
Greenblatt, on “Improvisation” (CR)
Tuesday May 11
Friedrich Nietzsche: “Preface”; “First Essay”
from On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)
Dept. of Philosophy
Thursday May 13
Nietzsche: “Second Essay”
from On the Genealogy of Morals
Guest Lecture: Professor R. Lanier Anderson
Tuesday May 18 James Joyce: “The Dead” from Dubliners (CR) (1914)
Thursday May 20 **SECOND PAPER DUE: 11:00 AM**
Joyce: “The Dead” (Film Clips)
Art: Picasso and Bacon
* * * * *