Literature
Building
237
Tuesday / Thursday 5:00 - 6:20
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What is wisdom? Is it a type of intellectual insight that penetrates ultimate reality? And thus is there one single wisdom, as wise in ancient India as it is in modern America? Is wisdom a more moderate form of insight? Might there be many wisdoms, each wise within its local (sub)culture? Is wisdom not a cognitive matter at all, but a mode of living? A special way of acting? Or is wisdom a literary genre? A discourse? Is wisdom inborn? Or is it learned? Can wisdom be taught? Who is wise? How do we recognize the wise? And what should we do, once we do recognize them?
To address these questions, the course is divided into two parts. During the quarter's first half — styled "Wisdom Unbound" — the class will read a number of texts out of context. Of course, such de-contextual reading is usually discouraged in literature classes. But this de-contextualization is necessary for our purposes, since we will try to identify trans-temporal, trans-local, trans-cultural indices of true wisdom. Among the texts to be read are: Plato's "Meno," Alan Ginsberg's "Howl," and William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as well as fortune cookies and bumper stickers. The second half of the course is styled "Wisdom Bound." Here, we will pay close attention to the discursive context within which claims to wisdom are asserted and accepted by an audience as authoritative. In particular, the class considers wisdom as represented in Buddhist writings: from the buddha himself, through the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, to the Zen Buddhism of Japan, to Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums.