Syllabus

CLST 180 Special Topics: The Poetics and Ethics of Revenge—Themes of Retributive Justice in Literature

Spring, 2009

Instructor: Alexander Loney, Ph.D. candidate in Classical Studies

Email: alexander.loney@duke.edu

Course Location & Time: 226 Allen, 8:30 – 9: 45 AM, Tues. & Thurs.

Office Hours: 10 AM-12 PM Tues. and 10-10:30 AM Thurs., von der Heyden Pavilion, and by appointment

Course Blog: poeticrevenge.wordpress.com

Cross-listing: Ethics

Class Attributes:

• (CCI) Cross-Cultural Inquiry
• (EI) Ethical Inquiry
• (W) Writing
• (ALP) Arts, Literature & Performance
• (CZ) Civilizations

Texts:

Primary (to be read in their entirety and works in brackets may be skipped):

• Homer, Odyssey
• Aeschylus, Oresteia
• [Euripides, Medea]
• [Seneca, Thyestes]
• Shakespeare, Macbeth
• Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas
• Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
• [Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter]
• Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
• Borges, “Emma Zunz”
• Dürrenmatt, The Visit (P. Bowles trans.)
• Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Supporting (NOTE: not all of these are required reading:

• Selections from other ancient literature: Homer, Iliad; Hesiod, Theogony; [Herodotus, Histories;] Plato, Gorgias; [Crito; Republic;] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (book 5).
• Selections from ancient/medieval legal texts: the code of Hammurabi; the Bible; Greek legal texts (the Draco’s homicide law); the Twelve Tables; and Germanic codes of wergild.
• On general ethics/philosophy of revenge and morality:
  • Murphy, Jeffrie. “Two Cheers for Vindictiveness,” in Getting Even (Oxford, OUP: 2003), 17-26.
  • [Mackie, J. L. “Morality and Retributive Emotions,” in Persons and Values (Oxford, Clarendron: 1985), 206-19.]
  • Selections from: Miller, Ian. Eye for an Eye (Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 2006).
  • Selections from Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
• Historical/theological views on revenge:
  • [Campbell, L. "Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England," Modern Philology 28.]
  • [“Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England,” by Ronald Broude, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 38-58.]
  • Selections from Aquinas, Summa Theologica
  • Selections from Calvin, Commentary on Romans
  • Bishop Joseph Butler, Sermons 8, 9.
  • Bacon, “Revenge.”
  • Poe, “Marginalia.”
  • R.R. Reno, “The State Without an Executioner,” in First Things (Apr 28, 2008).
• Anthropology of revenge, feuds, honor, and reciprocity:
  • Chagnon, Napoleon A. “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population.” Science 239 (1988): 985-992.
  • Review of Boehm, Blood Revenge by Robert Hayden in American Anthropologist 87.3 (1985): 716-717.
  • Selections from Mauss, Marcel. The Gift.
  • Lygia Sigaud, “The vicissitudes of The Gift,” Social Anthropology 10.3 (2002), 335–58.
  • Selections from R. Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
• Psychological approaches:
  • Martha A. Gabriel and Gail W. Monaco, “Getting even: Clinical considerations of adaptive and maladaptive vengeance,” Clinical Social Work Journal 22.2 (June, 1994), 165–78.
  • Selections from Max Scheler, Ressentiment.
• Philosophy of punishment:
  • Selections from Plato, Gorgias.
  • Hobbes, selections from Leviathan.
  • [McTaggart, "Hegel's Theory of Punishment."]
  • Kant, “The Retributive Theory of Punishment,” in James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems(Belmont, CA, Wadsworth), 229-31.
  • Hegel, selections from The Philosophy of Right.
  • C.S. Lewis, selections from The Problem of Pain.
  • [Edmund L. Pincoffs, “Classical Retributivism,” in Philosophy of Law, Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross, eds., (Belmont, CA, Wadsworth: 1980), 537-544.]
• Capital punishment:
  • [Maryland v. Booth.] (On victim impact statements).
  • Stephen Nathanson, “Should We Execute Those Who Deserve to Die?” In An Eye For An Eye?
  • Van den Haag, E. “The Ultimate Punishment,” HLR 99.7 (1986)
• (Just) warfare, pacificism and retribution:
  • Gary Wills, “What is Just War?” New York Review (2004)  51.18.
  • Brian Orend, “The Ethics of War and Peace,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • [G.E.M. Anscombe in War and Morality (1971).]
  • [Paul Griffiths, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jean Elshtain, "War, Peace, and Jean Elshatin," in First Things (Oct. 2003).]
  • Jan Narveson, “”Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis,” Ethics (1965) 75: 259-71
• The model of reconciliation:
  • [Selections from Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (1999)].
  • Gary Jonathan Bass, “Review: War Crimes and the Limits of Legalism,” Michigan Law Review 97.6 (1999).
  • Selections from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (2000).
• Forgiveness:
  • Jaeger, Marietta. “The Power and Reality of Forgiveness: Forgiving the Murderer of One’s Child,” in North, J. and R. Enright, eds., Exploring Forgiveness (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press: 1998), 9-14
  • Joanna North, “The ‘Ideal’ of Forgiveness: A Philosopher’s Exploration,” in Exploring Forgiveness, 15-34.

Rationale for the Course:

From time immemorial, communities have wielded retribution as a tool for obtaining justice in the face of perceived wrongs. Justice as revenge, as “getting even,” has occupied the storytellers and philosophers alike, but a retributive system of justice requires its participants to create narratives. Stories must be told to put the just and unjust, the blameworthy and praiseworthy in their places, for this is how we make sense of the causal and temporal relationships between an unjustified wrong and a justified response in kind. A moral agent must sequence events, locate and express causality, and place his actions in an ethical framework in order to participate in an ethical society. The articulation of these concepts lends itself to narrative more than dry legal formulations. Thus, literature from Homer’s heroic epics to modern popular fiction has been a site for human inquiry into the morality of retribution.

Guiding Questions:

This course is an exercise in studying the way we tell stories of retribution. Several thematic questions will guide our reading and consideration. What kind of justice is envisaged in the retributive stories we read? What are the limits and possibilities of revenge? How effective are agents in obtaining the justice they desire? How are communities influenced by and how do they respond to acts of vengeance? What effects do such acts have on the recipients and agents of retribution? How are stories of revenge constructed to include or exclude elements that exculpate one party and condemn another? How do these stories invite their audiences to ethical reflection and instruction? How effective are fictional genres at discussing genuine ethical concerns like revenge? What stories of justice as retribution do we tell today? What can we learn from these stories and how can we understand our own involvement in wrongs, enacted or suffered, and our own desire to see justice done? What role does retributive discourse play current moral dilemmas, such as capital punishment and just warfare?

Course Objectives:

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Understand and evaluate the different kinds of stories of revenge.
• Analyze the assigned material in its historical and literary context.
• Comprehend, contrast, and critique the different ethical frameworks of retributive justice and their alternatives.
• Employ various ethical frameworks encountered in their class readings in interpreting other historical and contemporary situations.
• Formulate persuasive and effective written analyses of literature, especially in its ethical aspects.
• Reflect on and express their own beliefs about justice, revenge, and forgiveness more coherently and more cogently.

Description of Readings:

This course will consist in a diachronic survey of revenge stories, grounded in our earliest folklore and legal traditions. We shall begin with evidence for the lex talionis in early Semitic and Indo-European traditions (e.g., selections from the Hammurabi code and the Noachide and Mosaic codes on homicide, as well as the Twelve Tables and Germanic codes of wergild), and Greek traditions about retributive punishment, for example, the Iliad’s shield of Achilles and legal codes, as well as artistic depictions of revenge slayings in Greek pottery. Against this historical background, along with a selection of ancient philosophical and theoretical texts on retributivism as a form of justice, we shall explore the literary stories of retribution. We shall spend about half the class on classical material, especially the Odyssey and the Oresteia, the former illustrating the epic hero in the role of avenger and the latter retribution as a tragic plot. Time permitting, we will also read Euripides’ Medea and Seneca’s Thyestes. Moving ahead, we shall also read Shakespeare’s Macbeth as an example of the popular genre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. From tragedy we turn to Romantic prose, the period that produced several of our most salient literary narratives of revenge (e.g., Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas). From the twentieth century we shall read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, and Borges’ “Emma Zunz.” We shall end our conspectus of texts with a popular, contemporary revenge narrative, the graphic novel V for Vendetta. Alongside these readings, students will be introduced to some of the rudiments of theoretical interpretations of revenge and retributive justice, such as Kant’s theory of punishment and contemporary “retributivists” like Jeffrie Murphy. Several of these secondary readings will be used to foster class discussion about the literary texts at hand and about relevant, current moral problems, e.g., Van den Haag on capital punishment, “The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense.”

Assignments/graded work:

• 1 page weekly response papers to readings. Due each Thurs., except in weeks with another assignment.
• A shorter, analytical paper (c. 4 pages) on one work. This will be an exercise in close-reading and careful exegesis of a text’s ethical themes. One mandatory revision.
• A detailed, written proposal (2 pages) outlining sources, methods, evidence, and basic arguments for the final.
• A final paper (c. 10 pages) analyzing two or more narrative texts (one of which may be outside the required readings) in concert with at least one secondary reading on the ethics of retributivism.
• At least one posting on the class blog and occasional comments on other posts.
• 2 quizzes to test reading comprehension .
• Regular participation.

Grade Distribution:

• 70% writing (10% responses; 20% midterm paper; 5% proposal; 35% final paper)
• 10% blog participation (5% post; 5% comments)
• 10% quizzes
• 10% class participation (includes attendance)

Grading Scale:

• 98.5% and higher = A+
• 92.5% and higher = A
• 90%    and higher = A-
• 87.5% and higher = B+
• 82.5% and higher = B
• 80%    and higher = B-
• 77.5% and higher = C+
• 72.5% and higher = C
• 70%    and higher = C-
• 67.5% and higher = D+
• 62.5% and higher = D
• 60%    and higher = D-
• below 60%           = F

Tentative Course Schedule by Week (Note: Subject to change!)

Week 1: January 7-9, 2009

Topics: Course objectives and expectations

Week 2: January, 12-16

Topics: Foundational definitions and concepts; lex talionis; ancient legal traditions. [Intro to Homer?]

Readings: Selections from the code of Hammurabi, the Hebrew bible, the

Iliad, Greek legal texts, the twelve tables, and Germanic codes of wergild; Jeffrie Murphy, “Getting Even: The Role of the Victim.” [J. L. Mackie “Morality and Retributive Emotions.”]

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 3: January, 19-23

Topics: Introduction to Homer (continued); the Homeric question; the Odyssey; the character of Odysseus.

Readings: Law codes (continued); Homer, Odyssey (books 1-8); B. Knox,

“Introduction.”

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 4: Jan. 26-30

Topics: Homer (continued); Greek myth and folklore of revenge; tisis, poine.

Readings: Homer, Odyssey (books 9-12); selections from Hesiod, Theogony, Herodotus, Histories

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 5: Feb. 2-6

Topics: Homer (continued); Greek xenia; reciprocity

Readings: Homer, Odyssey (books 13-24); Van den Haag.

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 6: Feb. 9-13

Topics: Intro to Greek drama: its history, context, archaeology, and major

authors; mythology of the house of Atreus.

Readings: Aeschylus, Oresteia I: Agamemnon; selections from Plato, Crito and

Republic.

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 7: Feb. 16-20

Topics: Greek conceptions of justice; dike, themis, charis.

Readings: Aeschylus, Oresteia II: Libation Bearers; selections from Aristotle,

Nicomachean Ethics (book 5)

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 8: Feb. 23-27

Topics: Drama and Athenian politics; Athenian law courts

Readings: Aeschylus, Oresteia III: Eumenides

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 9: March 2-6

Topics: Stoicism

Readings: Seneca, Thyestes

Assignment: Shorter Paper.

—–Spring Break—–

Week 10: March 16-20

Topics: Revenge tragedy; Reception of Classicism in early modern England; Political revenge; Fate and responsibility

Readings: Shakespeare, Macbeth

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 11: March 23-27

Topics: The Enlightenment, Romanticism, and revenge; revolts of the oppressed as revenge

Readings: Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”; Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas; Kant, “The Retributive Theory of Punishment,” in James E. White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth), 229-31; Poe, “Marginalia.”

Assignment: Revised shorter paper.

Week 12: March 30-April 3

Topics: Directions of retributive justice in the 20^th century

Readings: Dürrenmatt, The Visit (P. Bowles trans.); selections from Nietzsche,

On the Genealogy of Morals.

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 13: April 6-10

Topics: Revenge in opera and musical theater; presentations 1.

Readings: [Sondheim, Sweeny Todd;] selections from Miller, Ian. Eye for an Eye (Cambridge, 2006).

Assignment: Proposal.

Week 14: April 13-17

Topics: Revenge in popular culture; fantasy and revenge; presentations 2.

Readings: [Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta;] Edmund L. Pincoffs, “Classical Retributivism,” in Philosophy of Law, Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross, eds., (Wadsworth, 1980), 537-544.

Assignment: Response paper.

Week 15: April 20-22

Topics: Summarizing discussion; contemporary issues.

Assignment: Longer paper.