INST 3024 - Fear or Liberation?

Hours: 3
Takes up Carl Jung’s rather direct and provocative question: are you driven in the direction of fear or liberation? Fear is steadily immobilizing on both a personal and political level; it tends to be risk averse as its primary duty is to keep you safe, which is to say, keep you exactly as you have always been. While fear may be self-protective, Jung was most interested in how human beings begin to move - consciously or unconsciously - in the direction of their own liberation. In this class, we will study texts in literature, film, philosophy, and psychology that contemplate what it might mean to live in good or bad faith, examine the human propensity to ‘wait’ on a better life or improved situation, discuss the shaping impact of trauma and the role that community plays in its working through, consider the role that forgiveness might - or might not - play in personal or social liberation, talk about the inextricable link between the liberation of the self and others, and think carefully about what suffering - and, ultimately, death - might reveal to us about the consistently shifting human relationship to both fear and liberation.
Prerequisites: Jr standing or above, and a minimum of one course from at least four of the following INST threads: 2000, 2200, 2400, 2600, and 2800. Not open to students with credit for any INST 3000-level course.

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INST 3024 - Fear or Liberation?