GREAT WORKS IN DIALOGUE: ARE YOU WHAT YOU READ?

In this class we continue a two-year sequence of seminars, where students will come together to read great texts of philosophy, religion, and literature and to discuss the enduring questions these texts examine. We plan to offer you a long-term engagement with some of the monumental works and thinkers of the past and present. We will encourage you to challenge your own and others' ideas in the light of a rich, thought-provoking text.

Course Description
This quarter we will explore the question, “Are you what you read?” We begin with the great spiritual autobiography, Saint Augustine's Confessions, in which the author charts a course through his rhetorical and literary influences—and temptations—to establish his own identity apart from his largely secular culture. We continue with Madame Bovary, Flaubert's searing portrayal of Emma Bovary, a woman living in the French provinces who longs for Paris and a romantic life. We conclude with The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir of “a girlhood among ghosts.” Growing up first-generation Chinese-American in California, Hong Kingston's narrator searches for her own identity as she navigates between the mythical China of her mother's “talk-stories” and the America she now calls home. Each of these books forces us to question the relationship between fiction and fact in our own lives, and each captures our common quest to forge our identities from resources both real and imagined.

Instructors
Cheri Ross
Associate Director, Introduction to the Humanities
Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

Edward Steidle
Lecturer in English

Texts (available at Stanford Bookstore)
The books listed below have been ordered for this course, but any edition of these texts is acceptable.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. Pine-Coffin (Penguin)
Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. DeMan (Norton Critical)
Kingston, The Woman Warrior (Vintage)