2024-2025 Catalog

CSLC 202 Being-With, The Early Years: Language, Literature, and Culture in the Premodern Era

The philosopher Martin Heidegger once famously observed that for human creatures such as ourselves, Being is always a matter of Being-with: that is to say, a truly human life is necessarily a life lived in constant relation and reference to other human beings. And yet as Heidegger further notes, this existential condition of sociality depends, fundamentally, on our species’ rich capacity for language. In this class, therefore, we shall examine the interplay of language and human social existence, or culture, from prehistoric times to the dawn of modernity itself (roughly, to the time of the Renaissance and the rise of the nation state). In reconstructing this relationship between language and culture, we shall draw on the work of a large array of thinkers, ancient and modern, spread out over a number of academic disciplines: biology, anthropology, history, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, political theory, to name but a few. Yet throughout the class special emphasis will be placed on the question of literature. How does this particularly complex use of language relate to the making, unmaking, and remaking of human cultures in the premodern period? How might it affect our sense of the relationship between language, literature, and culture, today? In pursuit of such questions, the course will take us to regions as various as Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, Northern Africa and the Levant, Ancient Greece and Rome, India and Anatolia, Central Asia and Western Europe, and will draw upon written and oral texts as diverse as mythic theogonies and historical king-lists, philosophical disquisitions and religious incantations, publicly staged dramas and privately scrawled graffiti. Specific authors covered may include, but are not limited to, Hammurabi and Jeremiah, Herodotus and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Livy, Aurelius and Augustine, Ibn Sina and al-Farabi, Suleiman the Magnificent and Petrarch, Machiavelli and Luther. (Please note: although this course serves in many ways as a prequel to CSLC 203, the two courses can be taken in any order, or indeed quite independently of one another.)

Core Requirements Met

  • Pre-1800
  • Global Connections