Topic --  Love and Tears: Women Criminals and Saints
How do saints, criminals and women fit under the same headline
and what elements do they have in common? Starting with readings
of Christian mystic writers (Santa Teresa of Avila, St. John
of the Cross), advancing to Sade, Flaubert, Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, Unamuno, Genet and Cioran, this course will explore
our late-modern fascination with negative transcendence,
criminality, torture, and the "voluptuosness of suffering"
(evident in the interest in marginal figures such as
criminal saints and medieval women mystics), and will highlight
the spiritual dimension of eroticism on the one hand, and of
suffering and violence on the other. Course requirements: two
take-home essay exams.