Kālidāsa is generally considered the greatest poet of classical Sanskrit. Although little is known about him as a historical figure, Kālidāsa was likely writing in the 4th or 5th century CE, and there are three plays that can most certainly be attributed to him. In this seminar, we spend one day on Malavika and Agnimitra, the story of a king who falls in love with a picture of his queen’s maidservant; one day with Urvashi Won by Valor, the story of a mortal king’s love for a celestial being; and three days on Kālidāsa’s masterpiece, The Recognition of Shakuntala, a beautiful retelling of an episode from the Mahabharata.

Text: Barbara Stoler Miller, Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa. Columbia University Press, ISBN: 978-0231058391

The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli’s book on republics, is the great counterpart to his more frequently read book on principalities. It is essential for understanding his challenge to the philosophical and religious tradition. Machiavelli’s questions include: How are republics or “new modes and orders” established, corrupted, and sustained? What modes or orders foster freedom? How does the virtue of peoples differ from the virtue of princes? What kind of religion facilitates republican virtue? Is religion politically indispensable? What is the power of fortune and how can it be countered? How does Machiavelli understand his own activity in light of his teaching about politics? As preparation, participants should read The Prince.

Texts: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy. (tr. Nathan Tarcov and Harvey Mansfield), University of Chicago Press, ISBN: 978-0226500362

All Platonic dialogues are profound but none more than the Sophist. In this unusual dialogue, Socrates takes a backseat, merely proposing a guiding question for a conversation between a philosophical Stranger from Elea (in Greek Italy) and a young Athenian mathematician, Theaetetus. He asks, Are philosophers truly distinct from sophists? Soon, however, because sophists specialize in dialectical illusions, answering this question requires the Elean Stranger and Theaetetus to distinguish between Being and merely seeming. At first, Being seems to be simple unity, and appearance a diverse multiplicity. The question soon arises: If Being is simple unity, how could it generate the complex appearances we experience? To answer this new question, the Stranger makes a radical suggestion: Non-Being is! Join us to explore these and many other perplexities.

Text: Plato, Sophist: The Professor of Wisdom (Focus Philosophical Library). (tr. Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem), Focus Publishing, ISBN: 978-0941051514

The Maine Woods (1864) is one of Thoreau’s masterpieces, alongside Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Cape Cod. It contains three long essays, each describing a walk into the wilderness and exploring the flora and fauna as well as the people who live in the untamed forests. We get the most detailed portraits of individual Native Americans in 19th century American literature in this work of great originality and insight. It is a meditation on our place in nature, its prose extraordinary and sometimes incandescent. In this seminar, we also study the essay “Walking” (1862), another foundational environmental work. Both texts make a case for the preservation of the wild as essential to the health of a civilization and for individual sanity and authenticity. Why do we need wilderness? Why should we undertake serious walking?

Texts:

Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods. Penguin Nature Classics, ISBN: 978-0140170139

Henry David Thoreau, Walking. Dover, ISBN: 978-0486836485

A careful reading of Confessions reveals Augustine’s deliberate effort to recall, in God’s felt presence, the episodes and events in which he can now see and celebrate the mysterious actions of God’s prevenient and provident grace. The text follows the windings of Augustine’s memory as it re-presents the upheavals of his youth and the stages of his passionate quest for wisdom. Of particular interest is Augustine’s exploration of the nature of lived time, which, though taken up in detail in Book XI of Confessions, runs as a theme throughout the work from the very first paragraph.

Text: Augustine, Confessions. (tr. Thomas Williams), Hackett Publishing, ISBN: 978-1624667824

If you do not have the preferred text, other translations are acceptable, but must include the complete text. Please be aware that pagination and translation will likely differ.

“Hypocrite Reader—my Likeness—my Brother!” So Charles Baudelaire exclaims at the end of the poetic preface to Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire may not have had many brothers, but he had several brilliant sons and daughters—Virginia Woolf, Stravinsky, and Orson Welles among them. If one wishes to name a single father of modernism, Baudelaire would be a prime candidate. Dissent from all social ideals and a distaste for sentimentality are palpable everywhere in his poetry, which opened the way to an art of the future, exploring realms of symbolism, blasphemy, and exotic sensuality. This seminar studies a small selection of characteristic poems from Baudelaire’s masterpiece (in translation with reference to the French originals).

Text: Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs Du Mal: The Flowers of Evil. (ed. and tr. John E. Tidball), Bishopston Editions, ISBN: 978-1533212436

Boethius is falsely accused and awaiting death.

How can one find enduring happiness in an absurd world of injustice and evil? Boethius (c. 480-524 AD) wrote The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae) while awaiting execution in prison. He’s at first desolate, but Lady Philosophy appears to him and they converse. Their topics include the wheel of fortune, mutability, the divine source of wisdom, the problem of evil, freedom, and providence. The Consolation was a hugely popular book from the medieval era through the 18th century, influencing many writers, including Dante, Chaucer, and even Tolkien. It is a book of great depth and beauty.

Text: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy. (tr. David R. Slavitt), Harvard University Press, ISBN: 978-0674048355

Often regarded as the “first modern novel,” Don Quixote is also hailed as one of the best of all time. A recent survey of 100 authors from around the world cited Don Quixote as “the best book ever written.” At once tragic and comical, Cervantes’ masterpiece centers on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose witty and delightful conversations render them some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Through its many subplots and masterful storytelling, the novel delves deeply into the nature of love, human identity, madness, religion, and power, as well as the complex relationship between fiction and reality. Moreover, in Don Quixote we encounter the primal form and inspiration for much of the great literature that was to come, the spring from which authors as diverse as Dostoevsky, Kafka, Flaubert, Twain, Faulkner, Borges, and García Márquez emerged.

Text: Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote. (tr. Edith Grossman), Ecco/HarperCollins, ISBN: 978-0060934347

Melville courageously presents great moral conflicts in explosive and epic short stories and novellas. Narrative, character, thinking, feeling, and language go beyond limits to awakening the original American idiom of the quiet past for new stormy times. The tragedy of Billy Budd is an epic conflict of law, love, order, and authority, recalling Aeschylus and Sophocles. In Benito Cereno, we wrestle to see truth through a fog of obscurity. Freedom and slavery, violence and order, innocence and cynicism are hard to separate. Melville challenges our easy certainties, especially our sense of morality and pride. Beautiful language, unforgettable characters, great ideas, and lush imagery abound in elegant and surprising relationships with nature and true virtue.

Text: Herman Melville, Billy Budd and other Tales. Signet Classics, ISBN: 978-0451530813

In a broken world, is it foolish to be good, and wise to be violently selfish? Is there sanity in madness, and madness in sanity? Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy of betrayal, vendetta, and regret needs no introduction. It is a masterpiece of carefully crafted characters, and it is also the only Shakespearean tragedy with a pre-Christian setting. Who is in charge of this world? Is there any underlying justice, order, or meaning? These questions are dark and yet perhaps they will resonate even more profoundly as we read and explore this play during an uneasy time in the United States.

Text: William Shakespeare, King Lear (3rd edition). (ed. R. A. Foakes), The Arden Shakespeare, ISBN: 978-1903436592

Explore the world of Jane Austen through the juxtaposition of her first and last novels, originally published together in 1817, after her death. Northanger Abbey, written when Austen was in her early twenties, follows the adventures of naive 17-year-old Catherine Morland and her love of Gothic romance. Persuasion, written when Austen was 40, tells the story of mature 27 year old Anne Elliot seven years after she broke off her only engagement. Suited for Austen fanatics as well as those reading her for the first time, this seminar tracks the place of love, societal expectations, and family responsibilities in a woman’s life, as well as the effect of reading on moral choices. As we consider the world of the author, we also discuss the development of the writer herself and how it emerges in this pairing of novels.

Texts:

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Penguin Classics, ISBN: 978-0141439792

Jane Austen, Persuasion. Oxford World's Classics, ISBN: 978-0199535552

In this seminar, participants ascend the Mount of Purgatory—volume two of Dante’s three-volume epic, The Divine Comedy. Guided by Virgil, Dante climbs the seven terraces of deadly sin and meets repentant sinners undergoing their forms of purgation vividly and audibly, in accordance with their perversions or their deficiencies of love. Fearful though they are, the corrections of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust are born with prayer, song, and determination to summit at Earthly paradise, then beyond to heaven. Even non-believers have felt, from Dante’s Purgatorio, that their human souls, however botched by vice, bear a responsibility towards eternity—to be met with endurance and joy upon the anticipated recovery of purity, wholeness, and the Beloved.

Text: Any of these three editions is recommended.

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio. (tr. Robert Durling), Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0195087451

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Volume 2: Purgatorio. (tr. John D. Sinclair), Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0195004137

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio. (tr. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander), Vintage, ISBN: 978-0385497008

Bishop’s poems are lucid but deep and cold, like the water in which a seal appears in one of her most well-known works, “At the Fishhouses.” In that poem, she writes of being, “a believer in total immersion.” It takes patience and focus to remain immersed in the deep water of these poems—to notice details, to hear sounds, to ask questions of apparently simple images. Bishop’s poems are full of ordinary things—a waiting room, an armadillo, a moose. But the armadillo is running from a catastrophic fire; the moose steps out of the darkness and into the headlights of a bus; and the waiting room is a scene of transcendence. That is the object of our seminar: to notice everything, ordinary and extraordinary alike.

Text: Elizabeth Bishop, Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN: 978-0374532369