Family, Love & Justice
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Nothing is more foundational to the amplification of human experience, the development of individual consciousness, and the formation of group identity than the ethics, politics, and conflicts of kinship. In an imperfect world peopled with flawed individuals, ideals of parental care, filial piety, and sibling devotion provide beacons of responsible care, moral order, and natural justice. At the same time, however, these expectations also bring with them the dreadful spectres of tyranny, abuse, incest, rape, murder, betrayal, rivalry, and abandonment. While most lives fall short of the intensity of a Shakespearean tragedy, a downward turn of fortune (lit. catastrophe) is an inevitable part of all our lives. In an effort to survey the ethical, political, and psychosexual dynamics of the nuclear family, we will probe and compare four seminal texts of tragedy from Classical Greece and Renaissance England, a selection of quasi-confessional poems by Sylvia Plath, and a post-apartheid South African novel. In addition to these core readings and the concomitant development of oral and composition skills, students will also learn to consider and confront the positions of such eminent theorists as Aristotle, Frye, and Freud.
READING TEXTS BY ORDER OF COVERAGE:
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. with intro. Anthony Kenny (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 2000).
Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra, trans. H. D. F. Kitto and ed. with intro. Edith Hall (Oxford University Press, 1994 [reissued 2008]).
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (Martino Fine Books, 2011).
Hendrika C. Freud, Electra vs Oedipus: The Drama of the Mother-Daughter Relationship (Routledge, 2010).
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford University Press, 1987 [reissued 1998].
Sylvia Plath, “All the Dead Dears” (1957), “I Want, I Want” (1958), “Electra on Azalea Path” (1959), “Daddy” (1962), “Lady Lazarus” (1962), in Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (Faber and Faber, 1981).
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Vintage Books, 2000).