The Return of Antigone in the Time of Election: Moral Choices, Politics, and Personal Responsibility 3700-AL-RA-OG

Our close reading of Antigone will be a patient exercise in understanding what we can learn from engaging in an ancient work of literature. Sophocles offers us a profound insight into the complexity of human convictions, the conflict between secular and religious law, and the dynamics of gender and conflict. Analyzing the private and public spheres of Sophocles’s heroes sheds light on the perplexities of understanding the individuals and communities caught up in conflict.

Patience (ὑπομονή) should help us to practice endurance and steadfastness, especially in difficult existential situations and tribulations, and can serve as the antidote to the vices of pride (ὕβρις, superbia, pride is the beginning of all sin, Sir 10:15). By refusing to listen to those who question him, Creon’s makes himself deaf and blind. We will try to translate the meaning of deafness and blindness into the vocabulary of the political order and the citizen’s personal responsibility by welcoming the confusion of voices instead of trying to eliminate and suffocate them.

Listening is the mode of our being in the world with others. Ivo van Hove offers us a reinterpretation of Sophocles that is centered around the event of conversation. Juliette Binoche’s agreeable reading of Antigone and her struggles with Creon will assist us in our internal path through the conflicts that threaten our identity. We will watch the movie Antigone at the Barbican together to learn the possible advantages of experiencing the work of art in a community of inquirers versus engaging it on our own. The choice of the movie is precisely for its great potential for sharing the responsibilities of democracy. We might be, at times, critical of the movie, but learning to see the conflicting interpretations and live with them is at the core of our being in the (imperfect) world.

Realizing that mitigating action needs to be taken in a timely fashion, we will sensitize ourselves to be responsible citizens, especially when we are called to act.

Rodzaj przedmiotu

ogólnouniwersyteckie

Założenia (opisowo)

Fluency in English (B2)

Efekty kształcenia

Learning outcomes
Knowledge:
o student is familiar with the literature as indicated in the bibliography
o is familiar with philosophical hermeneutics and hermeneutic philosophy
o knows the state of research in literary studies and is able to design an innovative research project
Skills:
o can identify philosophical aspects of the task of thinking
o can address the importance of feelings (curiosity, patience, courage, uncertainty, self-esteem) and validates them in the process of learning
o can effectively communicate with other scholars in philosophy and liberal arts
o a creative and insightful student shows depth in thinking of and elaborating on original and novel ideas
Social competences:
o appreciates the need to learn to understand one’s life
o can set measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals and ways to achieve them in the context of academic, professional, and social activity
o sees the need for a dialogue between different academic disciplines and schools of thought

Kryteria oceniania

Students must attend classes, actively participate in discussions, and write a research paper of ca. 2500 words. The grade will be based on the paper 50%. Students should clear their topic with the instructor before writing. Final revised paper due Friday, January 26, 2024. Attendance/Active in-class participation (50%). Along with the final paper, students are required to submit a detailed report about their attendance and self-evaluation of their activity in the class.

Literatura

Antigone at the Barbican, directed by Ivo Van Hove, 2015.
Susan Bennett, Ivo Van Hove: from Shakespeare to David Bowie (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Tina Chanter and Sean D. Kirkland, ed., The Returns of Antigone: Interdisciplinary Essays (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2015).
Charles Freeland, Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2013)
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Publishers, 1991).
Jonathan Strauss, Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
Andrzej Wierciński, Existentia Hermeneutica: Understanding as the Mode of Being (Zurich: LIT, 2019).

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