BASC70221 - Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Beyond

Course Description

To marry or not to marry? It might appear that this is the question of Søren Kierkegaard’s seminal work, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843) – a two-volume paradoxical love letter meant to explain his broken engagement with Regina Olsen. In fact, Kierkegaard’s dialogical philosophical treatise is an invitation to take under scrutiny the human condition. Either/Or features two main characters epitomizing the aesthetic and ethical approaches to life, time, boredom, irony, and choice. It also includes a profound analysis of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and a novella, The Seducer’s Diary. If it were possible to transcend the ostensible duality of moral choice, would the answer be a dialectical Both/And? A Neither/Nor search for something third? Either/Or was only the beginning of Kierkegaard's quest for the meaning of the individual’s life. A selection from Kierkegaard’s later works (available in Canvas), including “In Vino Veritas” (the first part of Stages of Life’s Way) and The Point of View for My Work as an Author, will give us a taste of the subsequent development of his search. Expect weekly reading assignments of 60-90 pages.   Required book: Either/Or. Penguin Classics. Tr. Alastair Hannay. ISBN 978-0140445770.  Course Syllabus.

Notes

Online registration deadline: Dec. 22, 5 PM CT

Remote courses require you to login to Canvas to access the Zoom Classroom. You will receive an invitation to join Canvas about a week before your course begins. Please visit the Liberal Arts Student Resources page to find step by step instructions for Canvas and Zoom: Online Learning Resources