GERST 6780 - [Persecution and the Art of Writing]

(crosslisted)
(also ARTH 6780, COML 6661, GOVT 6785, JWST 6780, VISST 6780)

Spring. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

G. Waite.

Our title is derived from the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who provides our initial analytic, methodological, and theoretical model. But we extend it beyond Straussian ideological positions and we include Art unrestricted to Written philosophy and literature, as in painting, music, cinema, and Reason of State. Persecution (via censorship or heterodoxy) is understood as being both externally imposed and internalized. “The double rhetoric” or “esotericism,” and hence “writing between the lines,” has a millennial history dating back to archaic times in probably all known cultures. We focus on more recent manifestations across disciplines, periods, and places. Examples include Gramsci (Prison Notebooks), Hegel (as read by Left-Hegelians and by Marx), and Lessing (on the Free Masons), but also Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Wittgenstein, and their legacies.