Comparative

explore. The course will begin by reviewing Foucault's final lectures on parrhesia and "the courage of truth." It will then examine some of the ancient Greek and Christian texts that Foucault analyzed. It will go on to consider early modern instances of parrhesia (e.g. Galileo and Descartes) and will conclude by surveying relatively recent versions (e.g. Greta von Thunberg and James Comey, JD'85), including contemporary feminist and queer practices of parrhesia. Lectures and discussions in English. No prerequisites. epic this introductory answers to this on the ways epics the human relationship to We read the epics through the relationships of its central characters-humans, heroes, and gods. By following the winding quests and gory battles of these narratives, students examine how epics present various forms of human-divine relationships-transactional, intimate, inspirational, and manipulative. We employ a comparative approach to the our readings originate in different regions and historical periods-from ancient India and Greece to England, and the contemporary US. We will read these texts closely and examine how they reflect particular views of the human condition within religious worldviews. Considering the contexts of post- colonization, nationalism, and globalization, we analyze how mass media-comic books, TV series, films, and social media-shape and spread those to new one of the first publications Dostoevsky after Siberian exile. We will read and discuss the novel in Russian. We will explore Dostoevsky's philosophical, religious, and political views, as they are manifested through his design of the plot and characters. Near-native competence in Russian is required. at the How does it feel to leave a world behind? Are we already trained in this experience as readers of fictions, who leave worlds behind whenever we put down a book? Can this experience of imperfectly moving on from one world to another, whether the real world or that of another fiction, teach us anything about ourselves as human beings navigating the epochal shifts of climate change and late-stage capitalism? What narrative strategies emphasize the affective and embodied dimensions of entering and exiting from their fictional worlds? We will start answering these questions by reading J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, and Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World. Other course texts will be determined by student interests. Secondary and theoretical material will be drawn from a range of writers including Didi-Huberman, Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Heise, Amitav Ghosh, and K. Le Guin. This is a theory-oriented course that does not require previous knowledge. Students will have the option of producing a creative final project instead of a paper.