090091 VO Area of Ancient Greek Literature (Prose) (2024S)

This course directly engages both the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis to our contemporary world and the challenge presented by these critiques through a deeply historicized reading of fundamental texts in the psychoanalytic tradition.
In this course, we will squarely engage the questions of desire, language, and history in a range of ancient texts and modern commentators. In particular, we will read and comment on Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Artemidorus’s Interpretation of Dreams, as well as select poems of Catullus. Modern texts featured will include excerpts from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and Foucault’s Subjectivity and Truth and History of Sexuality. Reference will also be made to a wide variety of other modern thinkers stretching from Judith Butler, to Žižek, Irigaray, and Kristeva.
This course has three specific goals. 1.) It will expose students and auditors in the class to new ways of thinking about both the ancient texts covered and the way they, in turn, can shape our understanding of their significance for psychoanalysis. 2.) It will familarize students with basic psychoanalytic concepts and key contemporary debates surrounding them. 3.) It will present specific theses on the relation between rationality and enjoyment as understood in the traditional confrontation between rhetoric and philosophy and the historicization of subjectivity.