COML110 - Meditation and Text

Meditation, so it seems, is everywhere. Walking across Locust Walk, numerous posters jump to the eye calling for engagement with all sorts of mindfulness and spiritual contemplations. We often associate with it: quiet, detachment, calm. Yet before meditation acquired this silent character, it was in fact rather ecstatic and voluble. Meditators used to employ text to tease an introspection and put their experience into extensive writing that documents their reaction to the text, allowing the meditator to construct and reveal his or her self through the engagement with the written word. To study the history of meditation is thus to great extent to study the history of reading, and maybe more importantly, the history of the self. The course offers a survey of the history of meditation in the West: Starting with the self-examination of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the medieval monastic traditions, going through some salient meditators of the early modern period (Montaigne, Ignacio of Loyola, Descartes), all the way to the invasion of Buddhist trends to the West in the 19th and 20th century. It also provides a window to major intellectual trends in the West, and to some key texts of various religions. Given the nature of the material, we will be interested in the ways in which texts affect us, considering the impact of timing, location, reading out loud vs. silently etc. The course involves weekly reading of primary and secondary sources, active in-class discussions and brief individual presentations by the students. Students will be encouraged to bring from their own national/religious/cultural background and to develop a personal project that will culminate in a final conference-like presentation. This is proposed as a Critical Speaking Seminar.