Sections offered SPRING 2019:
#8521 |
LUKASZ SICINSKI |
MW 1:00pm-2:15pm |
HU 217 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
The question of the existence of evil has been a concern for philosophers, scholars, and everyday people for centuries. What is evil? How does it emerge and reproduce? Do human beings have an inherent capacity for evil? Do we know evil when we see it? A byword for countless phenomena ranging from bullying and sexual harassment to terrorism and genocide, evil resists our attempts to fix its meaning and capture its essence; at the same time, it captivates us – although we find it repulsive, there is something about evil that fascinates us.
Because what we call evil appears across a variety of contexts – be they the intimacy of a family circle, structures of political systems, or the functioning of global corporations – an attempt to account for what evil may signify calls for the application of multiple interpretive lenses. This course is an example of such a multidimensional approach. Based on an interdisciplinary framework exploring the intersections among philosophy, literary studies, and film studies, this course is designed to examine a selection of works that represent the multifaceted nature of evil and view the problem of evil as a morally contentious issue.
Issues discussed in this course include genocide and its representations, existential dimensions of evil, evil and religious belief, representations of radical evil and strategies of its aestheticization. Course materials include works by Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone, and Martin Scorsese.