FREN 6720

On Difficulty: Simone Weil and Others

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023. Courses of Study 2022-2023 is scheduled to publish mid-June.

This seminar is about the pleasures and perils, the uses and abuses, of difficulty.  It takes as its point of departure and return Simone Weil, the short-lived French philosopher and activist who died during World War II.  We'll be looking at what it could mean for someone to choose a life of brief intensity and uncompromising integrity over the more usual concessions to everyday needs and desires.  In the process, we'll place Weil into dialogue with other figures (from the medieval beguine Marguerite Porete to the Canadian poet Anne Carson and the English political philosopher Gillian Rose) for whom difficulty is something paraticularly true to human striving and human culture; something, in other words, to be cultivated.

When Offered Fall.

Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: any 3000-level course in literature or religious studies.

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