3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This seminar will investigate the staging of sacrifice at the border between scripture and literature. Imagined variously as a crucial site of affective investment, a bloody spectacle of corporeal destruction and a means of familial or communal rescue, sacrifice connects the history and theory of religious doctrine to political questions of sovereign power and aesthetic questions of form and genre. In this graduate seminar we will examine a sequence of sacrificial scenes primarily from classical literature, Hebrew scripture and early modern literature. We will conclude with a final discussion of contemporary art and culture. Across these transhistorical discussions, we will study and test the affordances of an array of theories of sacrifice. What forms of agency are modeled by the available logics of sacrifice? How does sacrifice operate across drama, lyric poetry and the early novel? Can we refuse the logic of sacrifice? Possible texts and authors include: Euripides’ “Hecuba” and “Iphigenia at Aulis”, late medieval passion plays on the death of Jesus, George Buchanan’s “Jephtha”, John Lyly’s “Gallathea”, William Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” and “The Merchant of Venice”, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”, George Herbert’s “The Temple”, John Milton’s “The Passion”, Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko”, and philosophical and theoretical writings by Søren Kierkegaard, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Rene Girard, Eugenie Brinkema and others.