English 120 – Morals and Ethics in Literature and Film:
MWF 11:00-12:20
A Transnational Examination of Civics, Responsibilities, Transgressions, and Crimes.
Course Description:
This upper-division English course counts for the ‘IV: Ethics' GE category.
This course is designed to investigate the moral codes and social ethics that drive individuals to do (or not do) the things they do. This exploration will cover topics such as gender roles, war, crimes, violence, religion, familial obligations, infidelity racism, suicide, and madness as it has been represented in literature and film.
Some questions that will be investigated are:
What are morals and ethics? Are they immutable? Are they constant throughout time?
What are the civic duties of humans when they live together? (family, organization, nation)
What is an individual accountable or responsible for?
What does it mean to be mad? Who determines this?
What constitutes a crime? Who defines it?
When does a human commit a crime against another human? Against a society?
When does a society commit a crime against a human?
When and under what circumstances can morals and ethics be broken?
The course will cover texts and films that come from various parts of the world and try to analyze and answer these and many other questions within the context of the work's creation.
Required Texts:
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Bertolt Brecht, The Exception and the Rule
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden
Shasaku Endo, Silence
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Assorted handouts and excerpts from: Plato, Epictetus, Niccolo Machiavelli, Rene Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Paul Sartre.
Required Films:
Neil Jordan, The Crying Game
Tom Tykwer, Heaven
Pete Weir, Dead Poets Society
Claude Chabrol, Une Femme Infidele
James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods (Stage Recording)
