Good and Evil: Heroism and Monstrosity

This fall I will be teaching a stock course in comp lit at UMass-Amherst entitled Good and Evil: East and West. I elected to teach the course--which I hear has always been wildly popular--and am honored and excited to have been given the opportunity by my department. Despite and perhaps precisely because of my committed effort to question all binaries, I found the "east and west" component of this course more problematic in planning than the more global topic of "good" and "evil." However we interpret the categories of good and evil--either as reductive, self-evident, nuanced, or non-existent--these two categories define our lives more than any other. What would you do if your father were tied to the train tracks, about to be obliterated by an oncoming train that you could derail, but in that derailing wipe out an entire village? These sorts of hypothetical and outright absurd questions have always interested me because of the broader questions that underlie them-- namely which is the correct choice, and is it amoral, neither concerned with good or evil.

Since taking ethics as a college undergraduate with my dear professor, Paul Guay, I have graduated from New England pragmatist to committed teleologician to a more Nietzschean reevaluation of values in order to truly understand and ultimately ( I think) reassert that morality that is most authentic.

Great...but how does one go about selecting texts that reveal the hairiness of this topic? Obviously, I want to steer clear of the hackneyed: Nazis, Stalin, Crusades, Terrorists, et al. But is the boogyman off limits? How about vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein, Satan, and that motley crew of shadows?

I have decided to play up the element of the uncanny in my course. How does one understand the archetype of a hero without at least engaging the question of monstrosity? Superficially, my knee-jerk reaction is to deny both sides of the binary. Evil results under certain conditions in which the desired result is A, but B is a logical effect. I guess it's a philosophical working theory...

Why I Am a Comparatist and What the Hell that Means...

Always have I enjoyed the edifying escapism of literature. The refinement that transforms simple sign into complex symbol, and absence into presence, is “instructive” through a sort of temporary metamorphosis. Students of comparative literature do not only, if at all, learn to experience the world vicariously; rather, they learn to see that world from a variety of different lenses. Through his mastery of modes of signification, the comparativist is at least able to view the world in technicolor, if not also synesthetically. Language is, of course, only a tool, and the language, mores, and spirit of particular epochs ultimately only reveal the universality of Man's aspirations, desires, fears, and experiences. Yet, reaching this conclusion is more easily achieved by a diversity of perspectives than the more singular myopia of monolingual expression and impression. Thus, my inclusion of “escapism” as a reason for my interest is really but a straw man. The discipline is only escapist in so far as it allows a reader to view the world from a diversity of ostensibly differing perspectives which, at least for me, usually ends in the realization that human experiences share more similarities than differences.