One oral report on a non-literary book concerning some aspect of masculinity will be required, as well as an extended written assignment. Students will keep a journal in which they will record personal observations, interview material, responses to class discussion and guest lecturers, and anything else relevant to their work in the class. This seminar addresses a fundamental issue that can be examined through a variety of disciplines. Each student will learn to use the library and to prepare a bibliography. Close reading and analysis are demanded.
Literature addresses the ways human beings live, individually and in a range of groupings.
One way or another, literature offers answers to ultimate questions about the meaning and value of our activity. Here we will read works like Ibsen's Doll House and Hedda Gabler, Shaw's Candida and Pygmalion, Flaubert' s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The seminar will also consider how the individual accommodates to life privately, through sensing and articulating his unique inner feelings, as in the poems of Emily Dickinson, or in the short stories of Anton Chekhov. We will also examine efforts by alert, knowledgeable, morally serious observers to integrate through essay and reportage efforts to make sense of the world. Here I might want us to read and discuss some modern classic writer like Lionel Trilling or Jacques Barzun, or simply peruse with care a journal like The American Scholar, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Commentary, or the like.