Myth, Play, and Reality

In this program for first-year students, we will trace theories of the mind that emerge in both literature and philosophy, scrutinizing the role of myth, play, and reality in mindedness. By "myth", we mean a range of approaches to storytelling, models for life, and everyday experiences of meaning; for us, "play" encompasses creative and intellectual activities capable of both unsettling and concretizing norms and values; finally, by "reality" we mean ... who knows? As this is a first year program, it's our goal to build a lively introduction to literature, writing, philosophy, and, more generally, prepare students for further study and research in the humanities. Students don't need any special preparation except to be adventurous thinkers with the desire to read widely and voraciously and the readiness to talk about books and ideas as if they held the keys to understanding the world — and the keys to realizing we don't understand anything.

As we move back and forth through ancient and modern examples of Western myth and thought, we'll be especially interested in imaginative philosophical and literary works that seek to construct a world or a way of thinking about being in the world—that old "human condition"— and those iconoclastic and skeptical thinkers and writers who work "negatively" and playfully to disrupt, critique, or reject received ideas. Authors and thinkers likely to be on the syllabus: Pre-Socratics, Sophocles, Calasso, Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Woolf, Joyce, Carrington, Borges, Beckett, Adorno, Benjamin, and Barthes.

While responding to readings, lectures, and program themes, students will learn to take active visual notes, to engage productively in seminar, and to write short "seminar essays". Major assignments will include regular exams, creative projects, and collaborative experimental performances.

Anticipated credit equivalencies:

FALL (14)

6- Introduction to Premodern and Modern Western Literatures

6 - Introduction to Western Philosophy

2 - Introduction to Creative Practice

WINTER (16)

6- Introduction to Premodern and Modern Western Literatures

6 - Introduction to Western Philosophy

4 - Introduction to Composition