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This First-Year Seminar explores how works of literature and philosophy respond to the question of the meaning of life. We will focus on the conditions of modern life – alienation, boredom, technology, modern warfare, the loss of tradition, the “death of God,” ecological crisis – that give rise to this perennial question in new and urgent ways. As meaninglessness looms, the capacity for revivifying and creative responses to this existential challenge emerge. Through close readings of literary texts such as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Kafka’s A Report for an Academy, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, James’s The Beast in the Jungle, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Chekhov’s The Bet, and Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals alongside philosophical texts by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, and others, we will seek to understand how thinkers and writers in the modern era pose key questions about whether life has meaning, and how we can discover or create it. Visits to the rare books collection in Sheridan Libraries, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Charles Theatre will enrich our discussions of these themes. Students will also engage in a series of in-class writing exercises throughout the semester, culminating in a hybrid creative/critical project that explores the philosophical ideas and literary forms they encounter in these works.