What is faith? What is the difference between faith and religion? What does faith mean in ‘a secular age’? And what is the relation of faith to belief, trust and wonder? Can a thinking of faith transform our understanding of the political? What is at stake in the relation between the question of faith and the question of literature? These are some of the questions that will guide our thinking on the question of faith in literature and cinema. We will be reading literary texts by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Flannery O'Connor, J.M.Coetzee, Shusako Endo and David Foster Wallace. We will also be reading key philosophical and theoretical reflections on the question of faith by Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. We will also be screening and discussing films by Terrence Malick, Robert Bresson, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Wim Wenders and Abbas Kiarostami.
abir.bazaz@ashoka.edu.in