Reading & Composition

Describing, performing, and creating ecstatic experiences has been one of the great stumbling blocks in literature.  Whether it is a physical or a spiritual elevation beyond the norm, the ability to articulate the transcendent has challenged writers in terms of the forms that can be used to express the ecstatic; this obstacle has also, debatably, given rise to a huge release of creativity and the rise of new forms.  We will explore the very limits of human experience in theatre, fiction, scripture, opera, and lyric poetry.  Euripides describes what will be the ongoing tension between freedom to experience aggressive and extremely pleasurable states with a need for the order and restraint of communal living.  From the time of the ancients to the present, individuals and societies have negotiated the restrictions on the experience of ecstatic states, and new cultural forms have come to fruition at that border.  We will explore the explosive collision of destructive and creative manifestations in texts through a variety of genres from different historical periods, and with the cross-disciplinary curiosity that defines Comparative Literature.

Euripides, The Bacchae

Bible, selections from Gospels, Isaiah and Acts of the Apostles

Apuleius, Metamorphoses

John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Shelley, Mont Blanc

Wagner, The Twilight of the Gods

Kushner, Angels in America: Perestroika

Aristotle, short selections from Poetics and Rhetoric

Burke, Edmund, A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful

Cicero, short selections from On the Ideal Orator

Freud, selections from Civilization and its Discontents

Hepburn,  “Wonder”

James, short selections from Varieties of Religious Experience

Longinus, On the Sublime

Matthew Wilson Smith, selections from The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace

Plato, selections from Phaedrus

____, selections from Ion