GERM 312 The Sickness Unto Death: Selfhood and Despair in Literature and Philosophy

What is despair and what does it tell us about being human that we alone can seemingly experience it? Is it equivalent to sadness or depression? Can it be relieved by material wealth, fame, success? For Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard despair was not a passing temporal condition but something that in itself points beyond itself to the possibility of its own overcoming. In doing so, despair, for Kierkegaard, forces open the crucial existential question: What does it mean to be a self? This course will examine this question by exploring changing conceptions of selfhood and despair from antiquity to modernity, moving from Achilleus’ despairing rage in the Iliad to Dostoyevsky’s depiction of the individual revolting against society in the Notes From the Underground and culminating in the seemingly irredeemable despair of Cormack McCarthy. Readings will include works by Homer, Plato, Thucydides, the Stoics, Marguerite of Porete, Meister Eckhart, Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Cormack McCarthy, and Flannery O’Connor. In addition to the English section, this course will meet for an additional session per week to read the and discuss the German language and other supplementary texts in their original. Readings will occur in German and will serve as an introduction to the major developments of the German language from Middle High German to the advent of High German in the writings of Martin Luther to its modern iterations in Hermann Hesse. Authors will include among others, Meister Eckhart, Martin Luther, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse while discussion will occur in English and German and focus on the intricacies  of the original language text and developing arguments out of it.