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SCAN 251 - Text and Interpretation: Masks and Ecstatic Experience - This is our foundational course, which defines the scope of what Scandinavian Studies is at the UO. It serves as an introduction to critical thinking as well. The course is designed to prompt an interrogation of mere appearances. This questioning of the superficial will be enacted through the close reading of a series of texts and films that highlight the difficulty of interpretation. The goal is to develop the critical thinking skills that enable students to read more accurately their experiences and environments. With this goal in mind, the course will introduce students to a number of works that use masks and tell tales of ecstatic experiences. The masks can be as simple as a pseudonym or as subtle as formal aesthetic choices. The initial premise is that masks are used to depict ecstatic experience (traumatic events, religious passion, sexual desire, and the like) because these experiences are transformative, and that the face of transformation, the appearance of becoming, needs the mask in order to be legible. While this course is an introduction to a way of thinking critically about cultural production, it also serves as an introductory survey to the art, literature and film of Scandinavia. In it we will learn to read, analyze, and write about short stories, plays, novels, and philosophy. We will also view several films. In this way, the student will experience a representative sample of Scandinavian cultural production after 1800 and learn about the context in which these cultural artifacts were produced. The class is conducted in English. This course satisfies the both the Arts and letters group and the International Cultures requirements.
CAS 101 - Reacting to the Past
HUM 300 - The Closest of Strangers: Africa and Otherness - The guiding premise of this class is rather straightforward: the understanding of the self and of culture as it emerges in European modernity is dependent on both a conception of the other and an idea of human progression. Therefore, we will explore how this relationship between self and other works within a specific dynamic: we will compare Europeans describing Africa with Africans describing Europe and the United States. In this way, we will be able to glimpse at the complex cultural legacies that have grown out of the triangular relationship between Europe, Africa, and the United States, which was and still is strongly punctuated by the trading of human beings as goods and its ideological justifications. Our exploration will raise many issues that are tied to some of the basic tenets that we attach to the idea of the self as it relates to larger categories of identification. These categories include: race, gender, religion, progress, development, primitivity, freedom, and the historical subject. As our concentration will reside in the realm of the cultural, we will read novels, watch film, and listen to music from England, France, Trinidad, Martinique, Sudan, South Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria, and the United States. All readings will be in English.
SCAN 407/507 - Seminar: Kierkegaard and Irony - At the very end of his career and shortly before his death, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, famous for stating that his philosophical communication was ‘indirect,” wrote that he had never been anything but a Socratic thinker. This can appear to be a curious postulation for Socrates, the legendary Greek, never wrote a word; while Kierkegaard tirelessly wrote two sometimes three books at once. Yet upon investigation it soon becomes apparent that Kierkegaard meant that while he could never tell us what he meant directly, he could, like Socrates spur us to thought through the use of irony. For if one recalls that Kierkegaard once ironically called irony the “way to truth but not the truth,” we can ascertain that he somehow understood the conveyance towards truth to be different than truth itself.
In this course we will investigate Kierkegaard’s aesthetic writings through the lens of his employment of irony. To do so, we will begin by looking at Kierkegaard’s relationship to Socrates. Then we will read and discuss several of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts, all of which employ irony as both a rhetorical and epistemological strategy. In this way, we can better understand how Kierkegaard’s philosophical strategy conveyed a sense of the reader thinking into the text in a manner that suggests praxis, and by how his work prefigures much of 20th century existentialist thought.
Texts under consideration will include but not be limited to: Aristophanes, Clouds. Plato. The Symposium. Kierkegaard: selections form The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. We will read Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, and The Concept of Anxiety in their entirety. |