Humanities 450    "Saints and Sinners"  

Spring 2004    Tuesdays 2-5:45 p.m.  4 credits   ID #8843

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"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah's enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn't that what the devil was supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be drive to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn't he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn't he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it." [Maurice Bendrix, in The End of the Affair, p.59-60]

What does it mean to be a "Saint"? What does it mean to be a "Sinner"? Did you know that not only historical figures (e.g., Joan of Arc, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Copernicus, Martin Luther, the Beguines) but also contemporary figures have been called by both labels?  In this three-credit Honors 450 topics course, we will examine the topic, "Saints and Sinners," from a variety of perspectives based on Western cultural traditions. We will explore what it means to be a "saint" or a "sinner" by studying selected lives of the saints. We will analyze how related terms such as "heretic" and "witch" have been linked to historical movements, particularly in terms of resistance to cultural expectations. We will examine questions of good and evil in the 19th, 20th (and now the 21st) century.  Some of our course work will involve the exploration of World Wide Web resources (see recommended sites below).

As we discuss selections from Saint Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions, considered by many a classic conversion narrative, we will examine selected literary portraits of "saintliness" and "sinfulness."  We will discuss the medieval pilgrimage,  exploring the role of the iconography and the labyrinth in the Cathedral of Chartres, France.  We will explore the question of good and evil by discussing selections from Boccaccio's Decameron as well as selections from the Malleus Maleficarum, the most important manual ever compiled on witch persecutions in Europe.  

We will view a documentary on the Inquisition as well as the1988 film Sorceress, a drama concerning a 13th century midwife and healer, Elda, and the Dominican frier sent by the Pope as an inquisitor whose objective is to identify and punish heretics.  Next we will study the historical "witch persecutions" in western Europe.  Then we will explore Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century American novel, The Scarlet Letter. 

We will explore 20th century responses to World War II by analyzing Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, alongside Agnieszka Holland’s film "Europa, Europa."   We will further contextualize the images of "saints and sinners" by discussing Graham Greene's novel, The End of the Affair, and viewing film adaptations.  Laura Esquivel's novel,  Like Water for Chocolate, and its adaptation into film will lead us into an exploration of the course theme in turn--of-the-century Mexican life.  Finally, we will explore the meanings of "saint" and "sinner" as reflected in Dorothy Allison's contemporary American memoir, 2 or 3 Things I Know for Sure.

Each course participant will generate and develop a semester-long individual project that explores a particular aspect of the course theme of "Saints and Sinners." Finally, during the last week of class, each participant will present the results of his or her project to the entire class, using an interactive, experiential format.   Note: this four-credit course is intended to be challenging; it will call for a good deal of reading and film viewing, followed by discussion.

Required texts:                  

1)  Boccaccio  The Decameron: Selected Tales

2)  Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (Dover edition)      

3)  Greene The End of the Affair 

4)  Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate           

5) Wiesel  Night

6) Allison 2 or 3 Things I Know for Sure        

7) Excerpts from The Malleus Maleficarum (online--see URLs below)

Recommended web sites: