English 495, Senior Seminar:
Highways to Hell
Dr.
Michael Bryson
Sierra Tower 832
michael.bryson@csun.edu
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum
Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der
Abgrund auch in dich hinein. [Whoever fights with
monsters should see that he does not thereby become a monster. And if
you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.]
Friederich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Beyond
Good and Evil] #146.
Course Description: This course will
explore the journey into and through the underworld as it develops
from Inanna and Gilgamesh to Orpheus and Eurydice and characters in
Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Marlowe's Dr
Faustus, Shakespeare's King Lear, Dostoevsky's Notes
from the Underground (and The Grand Inquisitor fable
from The Brothers Karamazov), and Bulgakov's Master and
Margarita. It will also makes stops along the byways of Hellish
situations and meditations such as those found in Orwells's 1984,
the Bhagavad Gita and Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Context will be provided in analytical readings from Carl Jung,
Kenneth Burke, and Søren Kierkegaard. AIl this will be in the service
of asking you to think seriously about what you have gained and what
you have lost by pursuing the course of study you are now about to
complete. Who were you when you began, and who are you now? What have
you become? Has the abyss gazed into you?
Office Hours
- I will be available in ST832 on the Thursdays of lecture weeks
from 2-4 PM PST. I will not have hours during finals week.
Email
- I will also be generally available by
email.
Questions are encouraged, and I will do my best to get back to you
with the best answers I have within 24 hours (and usually sooner).
If you are having difficulty with the material, tell me. I’ll do
the best I can to explain things more clearly, or answer any
questions you have.
Use of the Writing Center
- However, I will not serve as a pre-grade reviewer for written
work. That’s the kind of help you can get more efficiently from
the
CSUN Writing Center.
Evaluation Method: 2 essays 500 points each
(1000 points total).
Evaluation Standards: The essays will be
graded on a +/- scale, using the usual A-F symbols. Essays must be
written carefully, and revised before submission, not after.
To achieve the best results, I encourage all of you to write
your responses as early as possible, and then take a draft of your
final essay into the
Writing Center. But if that is not possible, at the very minimum I
expect you to pay close attention to details: do not misspell
character names (keep an eye on your word processor's spell check
function), misspell or fail to italicize literary titles, or fail to
pay attention to basic citation mechanics and conventions of quotation
(and papers must quote relevant material from the plays as
evidence for their analyses). See the links below (in the
assignment descriptions) for how to handle quotation and citation.
In general, the grading scale will be as follows:
|
Essays
A+ 100% (500/500)
A 95% (475/500)
A- 90% (450/500)
B+ 88% (440/500)
B 85% (435/500)
B- 80% (400/500)
C+
78% (390/500)
C
75% (375/500)
C- 70%
(350/500)
D+ 68% (340/500)
D 65% (325/500)
D- 60% (300/500)
F
50% (250/500)
Work
plagiarized or not submitted 0%
|
Course
A
925-1000
A- 900-924
B+ 875-899
B
825-849
B- 800-824
C+ 775-799
C
725-774
C- 700-724
D+ 675-699
D
625-674
D- 600-624
F 0-599
|
Assignments:
First, a note on what I find to be valuable and what I
find to be a waste of time in terms of literature courses and the
learning experience.
When approaching the literature of any given period (or author):
- The most valuable thing is simply this: careful and attentive
reading (I am still surprised by how many people skip this
step.)
- The second-most valuable thing is paying careful attention to
the various contexts (historical/social/political/artistic) that
surround the works in question (just a little more of this
kind of attention would head off many of the more absurd notions
that persist around Hamlet, for example)—such
contexts can be gleaned from a wide variety of sources: your
instructor (if you have a good one...not always a guarantee),
reference works (yes, even Wikipedia, which is actually quite
reliable for most things that are not contemporary and
politically-disputed in nature), and published scholarship—books
and articles about the author/works/time, sometimes written by
literary scholars, but often by academically-trained historians of
the period(s) in question.
- And finally, what is of value is returning to the text
(the play, poem, etc.) again and again, always trying to keep in
mind that what is actually in the text has to be our guiding
authority—clever interpretations sometimes have value, and
sometimes can be misleading. I am not opposed to such work, in
fact, I engage in it myself. But, when doing such work, always try
as much as possible to let the text itself—not an academic theory
about the text/applied to the text—be your guide.
- What is not of particular value, at least in my
judgment, are the very elements you will note I have left out of
this course:
- Your engagement is your reading, and the
thinking you do about your reading, especially
concerning its relation(s) to other art (literary and otherwise)
and its relation(s) to life as you know it, and to what you learn
(and have learned) about life as others have known it, both now
and in the past. If you do not do this reading and thinking at
anything more than a minimal level, no amount of
Education-school-inspired "learner-centered" activities will
compensate for that. Read. Think. Read again. Think further.
And then repeat the entire cycle.
And now, a description of the assignments you
will be asked to submit for grading credit:
Essay 1: worth 500 points (50%
of the grade for the course) in the range of 2000 words (6-7 pages).
This will be a narrative/apologia pro vita sua of yourself as
an English student (reader, writer, etc.). How did you come to
literature in the first place—in
other words, why do you read, outside the purview of a
bureaucratized higher-education institution that seems well-nigh
obsessed by doing "smart things" with literature? (One might well ask
why literature needs to have anything "done" with it in the first
place, but that would be to reveal oneself as unmutual.)
What has the "educational" experience of being an undergraduate
(and/or graduate) student of literature given you, not given you,
even taken from you where literature is concerned?
What has been your experience with the uses (and abuses) of literary
theory, the way it has been taught to you/the way(s) you have (not)
been taught to use it? This essay will be
due via Canvas submission by 11:59 PM (PST) on 3/29.
Essay 2: worth 500 points (50%
of the grade for the course) in the range of 2000 words (6-7 pages).
With reference to at least three of the works we have read this
semester, put your self imaginitively back in time and give your
current best advice to your younger self about the path they are
embarking on. What should they watch out for? What should they do
differently? The same? What should they try to learn that you did
not/have not yet? (A corollary question: do you think that younger
self will listen to you? Or have you become a kind of
Cassandra, doomed to know and understand, but never be known or
understood?) The final essay will be due via Canvas
submission by 4:59 PM (PST) on 5/17.
Weekly Preview
Week 1—Introduction to class, discussion of Dostoevsky, Orwell
Before class, have these texts read:
Weeks 2-3—Jung, Burke, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Orwell.
Week 4-5—Inanna and Gilgamesh
-
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns
from Sumer (51-89)
-
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and
Others (50-125, 155-60)
Week 6-7—Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphoses
-
The Odyssey Books 9-13
-
The Aeneid Books 1-4, 5.604-871, 6
-
Metamorphoses Books 10, 11 (Death of Orpheus section)
Week 8-9—Bhagavad Gita and Inferno. Essay 1
due.
- The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna's Counsel in Time of War
- The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno
Week 10-11—Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton
Week 12-13—In-Class Meeting 7: 7PM
JR 304 (Discussion of Blake, Dostoevsky)
Week 14-15—Bulgakov
- Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Finals Week—Essay 2 due on Canvas at 11:59 PM on the
last day of Finals Week
