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GREAT WORKS IN DIALOGUE: UNDERSTANDING THE SELF
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's focus is the theme of understanding identity.
We will begin with Plato's Republic, a rich and profound
philosophical dialogue focusing on the relationship between an individual
soul and the larger community, prompting discussion of how one lives
a just and well-ordered life. Our second set of readings explores
three of the major English Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Keats—and their efforts to define the emotional and intuitive
condition of the Romantic self, its intimate relationship with nature,
and its revolutionary sense of social mission. We will conclude
with Morrison's Beloved, a work exploring the aftermath of
slavery in the United States and the quest of its main characters
to come to terms with their haunted past, reaffirm their own purpose
in the present, and confront the future, both emancipated from their
history and bound to it by ties of identity and memory.
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.
Plato, Republic, trans. Grube (Hackett)
The Portable Romantic Poets, ed. Auden (Viking)
Morrison, Beloved (Plume)
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