About this Event
Pandemic. Climate Change. Assault on the Capitol. Gaza. Sudan. A Divided America. Like people everywhere, we in the United States are increasingly confronting what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” In this six-week course, we will read early and modern writers from Western and Eastern literary, philosophical, and religious traditions who have reflected on and responded to the violence and catastrophe, mutual incomprehension and division, characteristic of their own times in the hope of finding resources for thinking about the present.
Instructors: Alan Tansman, Professor of Japanese; Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature; Victoria Kahn, Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Paula Varsano, Professor of Chinese (all from UC Berkeley).
Readings (in order of sessions):
May 14: Jonathan Lear, “After this, Nothing Happened,” from Radical Hope (Tansman/Kahn)
May 21: Laozi, Daodejing, Tao Yuanming, "Record of Peach Blossom Spring," Wang Xizhi, "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Poetry Collection" (Varsano)
May 28: Hannah Arendt, selected essays (Kahn)
June 11: James Baldwin, selected essays (Tansman)
June 18: Gabriel García Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Hampton)
June 25: Allen Ginsberg, Howl (Hampton)
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Clio's, 353 Grand Avenue, Oakland, United States
USD 20.00
