Spirituality and Literature

What shapes the imagination and what grounds it? This course explores the significant questions of spirituality in a post-Modern world by situating those questions first in a reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet. These include the nature of identity; the quest for meaning; the basis of ethical decisions, the issue of creativity, and relationships with "otherness." The course offers a reading of reality based on Samuel Taylor (1772-1834) Coleridge's definition of imagination. He writes, "The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idea!ise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as an objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead (Biographia Literaria, ch. 13). We live in imagined world as if they are real, and so the ways in which the imagination is constructed, and depicted in literature offers us ways of engaging and thus of recognizing ourselves within maps of the spiritual worlds of those texts.