CPLT 202-002: Maj Texts: Renaiss To Modern (Spring 2010)

Content: To experience an act of betrayal is to be reduced to a kind of primal vulnerability-whether you are betrayed by your lover, your body, your country, or even your god. In such a state, one finds oneself split, ruptured, alienated from oneself. It is this feeling of being internally shattered that reveals to us just how powerful the desire for wholeness really is. The experience of betrayal uncovers the illusions of trust by which we do (and must) live. We believe in the possibility of a predictable future, of a readable world, of a complete and possible knowledge. This is why the act of betrayal brings down the entire "house of being" when it occurs. And among the ruins, we realize that the future was always unknown and unwritten. In this class, we will explore the representation of betrayal and the figure of the one who suffers and is transformed through his or her suffering. We will try to be open to the idea that all fidelity is made possible only by the threat of its own undoing, by the very act of betrayal that seems to be its breaking point. Finally, we will try to step back and ask how it is that texts themselves perform what might be called acts of betrayal-betraying their declared allegiances, their literary genres, and their narrative aspirations.

Particulars: Class participation, informal reading responses, two short papers and one final paper.

Texts: May include works by Balzac, Flaubert, Kafka, Rilke, Duras, and Beckett, as well as excerpts from Descartes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Blanchot and Levinas.