Choose three concepts we have explored since the beginning of the term and make an argument for why we need to continue to explore these concepts if we are to have a world worth living in. You will be graded on how robust your answer is as well as how you demonstrate your mastery of the works in which these concepts are found.
1. “The hens dreamed she could fly” themes surrounding parenthood, letting go of the ones we love, and finding peace in what we cannot control in what we have read thus far.
2. Tolstoy’s Metamorphosis. Our study of Tolstoy yielded some conclusions that should give us all pause. What is the meaning of life? If it is to negotiate the mundane, the boring, and the trivial, how are we to ever derive true meaning out of that? It is now that we turn to Kafka’s response to what Tolstoy was only alluding to. Metamorphosis is more a statement about being a cog in the machine more than it is a statement about anything else. Kafka, of course, takes the conversation about the state of humankind to an entirely different and admittedly disturbing level
3. While many thinkers continued to wrestle with the growing sense of alienation and despair caused by a multitude of factors, mainly those related to industrialization and the breakdown of the family, others took the baton further downfield by immersing themselves, not in the causes, but in the results. What does life look like when the person just gives up and succumbs to the system? Tolstoy, in part, tries to answer that in his work, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”
4. The Romantics ignited a fire that was certain to spread across the pond. The negative effects of industrialization did not manifest themselves in Europe alone; the United States was also experiencing its fair share of a spiritual malaise that nevertheless energized some individuals to speak out. These became the Transcendentalists. explore Thoreau and Emerson
5.The Romantics, a group of writers that included Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, and Keats, deviated from the Age of Reason by training their sites on the importance and relevance of emotion. While the Enlightenment thinkers celebrated the ability of individuals to reason and, thereby elevated their status among the denizens of creation, the Romantics broadened the scope by celebrating the ability of individuals to feel. In a rapidly industrializing world, many were feeling the effects of alienation and loneliness, so the Romantics made it their mission to retrieve what was lost: innocence, bliss, and intimacy with God.6. Enlightenment thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had very different philosophies about the character of humankind. While the former thought that we essentially lead “brutish” lives, the latter was more optimistic about this thing we do in between birth and death. This week, we are going to jump right into this debate. Our aim is to understand what will come out of this difference of opinion — what it holds for the post-Enlightenment world with its governments, its policies, its social movements.
Requirements: at least 750words
