GERST 6010 - [Friendship]

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6030)

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

E. Siegel.

Disciplines as different as anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, and sociology have developed a strong interest in the theory and practice of friendship in recent years. Whereas definitions of friendship traditionally emphasized proximity, similarity, and mutuality, these new readings find distance, difference, and asymmetry at the core of this relation. Friendship can thus be read as promising radically different forms of community. Explores reflections on friendship in changing contexts and discourses: Friendship’s place in ethics and moral philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant, Foucault); the genre of the essay and friendship (Montaigne, Bacon, Emerson, Nietzsche); the politics of friendship (Lessing, Arendt, Derrida, Schmitt); the 18th century German ‘cult of friendship’ (Schiller, Luhmann); literary re-configurations of friendship in modernity (Kafka, Bernhard); sociology’s investigation of friendship as the locus of discretion and tact (Simmel).