Reading & Composition

This course will explore the lineaments of 20th and early 21st century Western thought and literature – not only its fragmentation, dislocation, and disjointedness – but the fracturing of the concept of forgiveness.  The possibility, and promise, of ultimately being able to forgive, or be forgiven, becomes elusive in this period.  What renders forgiveness so difficult to give?  What does forgiveness come to signify? What is substituted for forgiveness?  How is the unforgivable, the shameful, the unmentionable, represented in literature?  We will begin our examination by developing a background and lexicon of forgiveness.  As our analysis will be comparativist, we will look at texts from a variety of genres and historical periods, including selections from the Bible, a Greek tragedy, a medieval epic and a19th century French short story.  We will then move to an examination of forgiveness in contemporary literature, including the texts of Morrison, Wiesel, McEwan and Safran Foer.  We will also consider how the problematics of forgiveness are echoed in the philosophical and psychoanalytic literature of this period.