Fall 2006

Humanities 395: Advanced Special Topic:
PLEASURE

In Fall 2006, the Center for the Humanities will sponsor a semester-long course that will bring four distinguished scholars to campus as Distinguished Visiting Professors in the Humanities:

Aug. 28 - Sept. 15 -- Professor Carolyn Dean: How have historians and other writers recently approached the representation of suffering in their work? How have attitudes toward representations of suffering and atrocities in historical narratives changed since the Second World War and especially in response to recent events? Why are narratives of human suffering from the Holocaust to photos of Abu Ghraib so often dubbed "pornographic"—as if to imply that they generate pleasure? Readings will include selections from Carolyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others; Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners; Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust; Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda; and Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma Studies," from History in Transit.

Sept 25 - Oct 13 -- Professor Shuen-Fu Lin: “The Pursuit of Happiness in the Chinese Tradition: The First Episode”: The thematic focus of this segment of the course is what the philosopher-psychologist William James observed a century ago: “How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.” Although the idea of the “pursuit of happiness” has a privileged place in American thinking, reflections on the happiness question can readily be found in many other cultures through the ages as well. In this segment of the course, we will study selected texts from early Chinese civilization as their creative and thinking authors pondered this age-old question and the meaning of life. We will discuss such issues as the generally life-affirming world views of the Chinese; the debates on how to construct a perfect society; what constitutes a good life; objective and subjective well-being; the fulfillments of spiritual cultivation, having a family and friends, work and play, and public service and/or private artistic and scholarly pursuit; and attitudes towards fate, suffering, evil, war, and death. Sample readings include texts in the philosophies of Confucianism, Daoism (aka Taoism), Legalism, and Buddhism.

 Oct. 23 - Nov. 10 -- Professor Jennifer Doyle: Pleasure– what we find pleasurable and why – is political.  In reading feminist criticism, for example, we discover that the basic forms of storytelling in cinema depend upon the visual objectification of the woman on the screen.  Laura Mulvey, in fact, concludes her essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema with a manifesto for the “destruction of pleasure”.  In Marxist criticism, we discover that the pleasures of mass entertainment work to contain, rather than realize, our desires.  Marxist philosopher Siegfried Kracauer thus calls for the destruction of these consumerist forms of pleasure, and for their replacement with new experiences that will enable new forms of consciousness. In this seminar, we will read key text in critical theory on the politics of pleasure, and look at artists’ attempts to invent new, revolutionary forms of pleasure. Readings will include Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Adorno & Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry”, Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, and Kobena Mercer’s “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racism and the Homoerotic Imaginary”.  We will look at art by Andy Warhol, Catherine Opie, Kehinde Wiley, Tracey Emin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ron Athey, and others.  This course will also include two film screenings outside class meeting time: Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorema (1968).

Nov. 13 - Dec. 1 -- Professor Claire Colebrook: “Happiness and the Narrative Life”: Why do human beings fail to act in their own interests? Two answers have dominated the Western tradition. The first, Aristotelian, approach argues for a distinction between happiness and pleasure, with pleasure being inhuman and transitory while happiness has to do with self-definition and a narrative life. The second, Freudian, approach argues for an essential conflict and tension in life with the pursuit of happiness often leading to a damaged life. This seminar will consider the following questions: What image or ideal of the self is presupposed in definitions of happiness? How is the concept of happiness tied up with notions of time and narrative? Do Freud's claims regarding the neurotic nature of Western civilization allow us to understand current claims about human life or do we need to think happiness through different models of selfhood? Readings will include Freud, Civilization and its Discontents and selections from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self; Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life; and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot.

Prerequisites: Junior or Senior Standing, and at least one of the following: ART 231 or 232; CHN 230, 241, 275, or 277; ENG 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, or 273; GRM/GLS 227 or 233; GWS 249; HIS 238, 239, or 33x; PHI 231, 235, 265, or 268; REL 216, or 222; THE 201, 202, or 203; some 300-level literature class; or permission of the instructor.

Questions should be directed to Alan Schrift, Director, Center for the Humanities, schrift@grinnell.edu.