LITERATURE HUMANITIES SPRING 2001 HAM 407, TR 4:10-6:00 Instr. Göran Blix e-mail:gmb21

Literature Humanities: Paper # 2 (8p)

Instructions: Write an 8 page paper on one of the topics below. The paper is due May. 2 by noon in my mailbox. You are welcome to suggest a topic of your own; in fact, I would encourage it, but make sure to check your idea with me beforehand. You can also adapt these questions somewhat, or apply them to other works.

1. Several works we have read this semester address the complex relation between human affections and quantitative measurements: e.g. King Lear, Candide, and Pride and Prejudice. How do each of these texts explore, represent, and problematize the attempt to impose a calculus on the world of human passions / suffering? Do they propose any alternative method of understanding?

2. Augustine’s Confessions is a paradigmatic conversion narrative. Can Don Quixote and Candide also be read as tales of conversion through wandering? If so, how? And conversion to what? How do these secular texts “pervert” the conversion narrative? What function does “belief” play in them?

3. Boccaccio’s hundred stories clearly echo Dante’s hundred cantos. Focusing on Ser Cepperello’s fraudulent confession on his death-bed (Decameron 1.1), discuss how Boccaccio turns Dante’s vision of a divine judgment of human action into a purely “human comedy.” What are the limitations of human judgment? Are appropriate punishments also meted out in this life? (Hint: refer also to 4.2 and 8.7).

4. The canon at the end of Don Quixote I articulates two distinct theories of artistic imitation, realistic and idealizing. Which theory, if any, does Cide Hamete Benengeli’s style of writing most exemplify? Do “fiction” and “history” as genres demand a particular poetic style? Why would a historian idealize, or a novelist pass a fiction off as true? What is at stake in blurring this generic boundary? How does the knight errant himself enact this theoretical quandary?

5. Montaigne writes that “every action reveals us” (131). How does Pride and Prejudice mobilize this insight—the idea that seemingly trivial actions or statements can reveal a person’s true character—in its own style of portraiture, and in the judgments the characters pass on each other?

6. What is the relation between (self-)knowledge and prejudice in two or three texts we have read recently (e.g. Essays, King Lear, Candide, Pride and Prejudice)?

7a. Analyze the dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, and discuss some of the things that function as “others” (e.g. nature, cannibals, Chinese, the imagination, kidney stones, death, etc.) in his narrative of the path to self-knowledge. –7b. How do self and other mirror each other to mutual benefit in Pride and Prejudice? How does this internal mirroring itself reflect the genre it occurs in—i.e. satire, and satire’s claim to hold up a mirror to human folly?

8. Elizabeth's critique of social conventions, in Pride and Prejudice, demystifies the “prudent” marriage as a “mercenary” one. Is the type of marriage she favors, one based on enlightened affection, outside the scope of economics? How might such a claim be problematized by Elizabeth and Jane’s prosperous and socially advantageous marriages? Are human affections themselves possibly open to cost-benefit analysis—to a rational calculus seeking to produce the maximum happiness?