Studies in Contemporary Literature (461-0-20)
Topic
Hannah Arendt: Poetry, Politics, & Thought
Instructors
Susannah Gottlieb
847/491-3091
University Hall 321
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt's massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism. For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt's contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the "holes of oblivion." Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work: faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions? Arendt's next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity: from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action. As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity—namely, the dimensions of the "active life"—we examine Arendt's attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a "contemplative life" concretized. This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where Arendt re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness. As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human "conditionality," and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics.
Class Materials (Required)
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (any edition)
Arendt, The Human Condition (any edition)
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (any edition)
Additional texts available on Canvas