Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé
Graduate Seminar
A Different Order of Difficulty: 20th Century Paradoxes of Secular-Sacred Yearning
In this course, we will examine a set of 19th and early 20th-century texts, paying attention to the seemingly paradoxical
attraction of secular modernism (and particularly of the self-consciously crafted high modernist “masterpiece” and its
legacy in post-1945 literature) to mystery, wonder and transcendent experience. We will also explore the relationship of
this attraction to modernism’s trademark obsession with difficulty and fascination with puzzles, riddles, unanswered—
and often unanswerable—questions and quests for their solutions. Taking as a point of departure the unofficial
requirement that modernism, in Eliot’s terms, “must be difficult,” we will examine the ways in which this requisite
difficulty lies not only in the challenging calls for erudition and intellectual work that many high modernist texts have
come to exemplify, but in their treatment of the perennially irresolvable questions of human existence (the meaning of
life, the problem of the self and other minds, and the hiddenness of God) that are representative of what Ulysses’
Leopold Bloom calls “a different order of difficulty” and which often demand unorthodox kinds of interpretive
involvement of their readers. We will explore modernist literature’s exploitation of, riddle, enigma, paradox and parable
as instructive devices for leading readers to take up the work of grappling with the deepest of ethical, spiritual and
aesthetic questions. We will also focus on the way this “different order of difficulty” is bound up in the works we will
explore here (by Woolf, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Kafka, James, Joyce, Murdoch and Coetzee) with a
committed yet inherently frustrated yearning for self-improvement, spiritual enlightenment and transformative vision
that is further complicated by the ironic dissonance arising from their authors’ ability to look upon such problems from
the perspective Wittgenstein described as “a religious point of view” in spite of their staunch commitment to atheism or
agnosticism.
Required texts
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Annotated, Hussey, ed.)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor (Hackett, Guignon, ed.)
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings (Penguin Classics)
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Henry James, The Sacred Fount
Franz Kafka, Kafka’s Selected Stories (Norton, Corngold, ed.)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Iris Murdoch, The Bell
J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
All other readings will be made available on course website or via email or as photocopies
distributed in class
Week 1
Introduction
For further reading:
Pericles Lewis, “God’s Afterlife,” Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel
Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, “Introduction: The Varieties of Modern Enchantment,”
The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age
William T. Noon, “God and Man in Twentieth-Century Fiction”
Week 2
Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” Moments of Being
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Week 3
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “Modern Fiction”
Pericles Lewis, “Virginia Woolf and the Disenchantment of the World”
Martha Nussbaum, “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse”
Week 4
Virginia Woolf, “The Russian Point of View”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Week 5
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, selections
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”
Cora Diamond “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the Tractatus”
Cora Diamond, “Introduction to ‘Having a rough story about what moral philosophy is’”
Recommended: Marjorie Perloff, “The Making of the Tractatus: Russell, Wittgenstein and the
‘Logic’ of War,” Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
James Conant, “What Ethics in the Tractatus is Not”
Week 6
parables
Franz Kafka, “On Parables,” “The Silence of the Sirens,” “Before the Law” and selected
Week 7
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Recommended: Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” Prisms
Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law”
Frank Kermode, “Hoti’s Business: Why Are Narratives Obscure?,” The Genesis of Secrecy
Pericles Lewis, “Franz Kafka and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion”
Walter Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” Illuminations
Walter Sokel, “Between Gnosticism and Jehovah: The Dilemma in Kafka’s Religious
Attitude” from The Myth of Power and the Self
Week 8
William James, from The Varieties of Religious Experience
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Pericles Lewis, “Henry James and the Varieties of Religious Experience”
First conference-length paper (option 1) due
Week 9
Henry James, The Sacred Fount
Robert Weisbuch, “James and the American Sacred”
Hazel Hutchinson, from Seeing and Believing: Henry James and the Spiritual World
Week 10
Henry James, The Sacred Fount
Week 11
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Neil Murphy, “Sin and Redemption in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man”
Week 12
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Week 13
Iris Murdoch, The Bell
Simone Weil, “Human Personality” and selections from Gravity and Grace
Herrie lee, “A Reading of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell: In the Light of Simone Weil’s Ideas”
Paper prospectus and annotated bibliographies due
Week 14
Iris Murdoch, “Above the Gods: A Dialogue about Religion,” “Existentialists and Mystics”
Week 15
J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
Derek Attridge, “Epilogue: A Writers Life”
Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Philosophy and the Difficulty of Reality”
Stephen Mulhall, selections from The Wounded Animal
Second conference-length paper (option 1) or final article-length paper (option 2) due
Course Requirements:



Engaged reading of course material; consistent, active participation in class
discussions
Seminar paper(s): Either Option 1, two seminar papers (conference-length—around
10 pages due in the middle and at the end of the term) OR Option 2, one seminar
paper (article-length—around 20 pages—due at the end of the term).
Presentations of course material/discussion leading (one or two times per semester)
By 7 pm on the day before you are scheduled to present and lead discussion, the presenter
must send me by email a concise statement including, 1. An indication of which primary
and/or secondary text(s) (or parts/aspects of those texts) you will cover as well as of your
general line of interpretation or inquiry and whatever lessons, insights or ideas you aim to
convey to the class; 2. an outline of the direction your arguments will likely take and the
textual examples you’ll likely refer to. In addition, whoever is presenting in a given week
should formulate a set of questions, to be distributed to the class, that offer a general
framework for the discussion. These questions can go beyond the scope of the presentation,
but should intersect, at least in part, with the more intensive focus of the presentation.