Does civilization make us happy or unhappy? What do we owe each other? What does civil society contend with conflict and resistance? Culture has given us many texts dealing with these questions, none that provide easy resolutions but all of which allow for thoughtful reflection on the issues at stake. In this course, students will explore influential works of philosophy and literature that address fundamental questions about the relationships of human beings to one another, about political structures, and about the tensions between individuality and community. In the first part of the course, we will read ancient Greek texts (including Plato, Sophocles, and Aristotle) concerned with what it means to live a "good" life, and with the possible conflicts between duty to family and society. The second part of the course will move to the age of Enlightenment, when important advances in science spurred new reflections on the boundaries of knowledge, on the defining features of human nature, and on the kind of society best suited to human nature. Readings in this part of the course will include Descartes, Locke, Rousseau and Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. In the last part of the course, we will examine important modern efforts to understand the conflicts between individual desire and ambition on the one hand and personal and social responsibility on the other hand. Philosophical touchstones will include Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud. Students will choose among a selection of works of fiction for their final reading of the semester (eg. Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky).This course aims to cultivate students' skills in literary analysis and philosophical argumentation. We will be reading texts that encourage this process. The texts can be challenging, and we will acknowledge the challenge by proceeding slowly. We will not seek a comprehensive assessment of everything these texts have to say, but a growing understanding of the main ideas and themes that animate them and that bring them into dialogue with each other. There will be no presumption of previous acquaintance with any of the readings or topics discussed, or indeed with any philosophy or literature at all. The primary skills this course aims to encourage are analytical reading, creative thinking, productive conversation, and clear writing. Requirements include weekly short writing assignments, organized small group debates, a midterm and final project (formal paper, podcast, or “video essay”).
About Professor Yousef
Nancy Yousef specializes in literature and philosophy of the Romantic era. Her research and teaching are centered in British and European Romanticism, but also extend to eighteenth century sources and forward into the later nineteenth-century. She is especially interested in the intersections between philosophical writing and literary form, and in the relations among aesthetics, ethics, and representation of the emotions. She is the author of three books: Isolated Cases (Cornell UP, 2004), Romantic Intimacy (Stanford UP, 2013; winner of the Barricelli Prize), and The Aesthetic Commonplace (Oxford UP, 2022). The first addresses the conceptual contradictions and psychic longings and anxieties associated with shifting ideas of autonomy in Enlightenment philosophy and Romantic literature. The second book explores the shifting relationship between ethics and aesthetics as eighteenth-century theories of sympathy give way to accounts of elusive and non-reciprocal forms of emotional proximity. Her most recent book is a study of the commonplace as region of overlooked value in the work of the Romantic poet (William Wordsworth), the realist novelist (George Eliot), and the modern philosopher (Ludwig Wittgenstein) who are best known for their commitment to the ordinary as resource for reflection on language, thought, feeling, and social attunement. Professor Yousef's essays on Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Dickens have appeared in venues including ELH, MLQ, European Romantic Review and the Journal of the History of Ideas and she has been the recipient of fellowships from the Newcombe Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center.