Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
Read the classic postwar novel that made Hemingway the voice of the "Lost Generation."
The political instability of our moment feeds in part on a widespread sense of personal unease, particularly among the young. The philosophic foundation of that unease is the experience definitive of existentialism—the sense of “an absolute rift between man and that in which he finds himself lodged,” as Hans Jonas put it. This course will explore two alternative accounts of this existential condition and the proper human response to it.
Blaise Pascal, the great 17th-century polymath sometimes called “the first existentialist,” powerfully depicted the human experience of dislocation within the “eternal silence of the infinite spaces” described by modern science. He found in this experience of cosmic “thrownness” the deepest impetus for man’s search for the transcendent yet personal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Centuries later, Albert Camus would ask the question of how human beings could affirm life in the face of its intrinsic godlessness and meaninglessness, and sketch a form of existential heroism that managed to say “yes” to life in spite of its absurdity. Our exploration of these two authors is intended to help students with their own efforts to live dignified lives in a world so many find unsettling.
Ben Storey & Thomas Chatterton Williams on Pascal & Camus
This course is offered by Humanities at Hertog. It takes place weekly on Mondays, via Zoom, from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM ET. Fellows will receive a $150 stipend contingent upon participation in the course and completion of a brief response paper. All course materials will be provided.
Faculty
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visiting Professor of Humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visiting Professor of Humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from New America, Yaddo, MacDowell, and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Nothing Was the Same, will be published by Knopf.
Benjamin Storey
Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He recently co-authored a book with Jenna Silber Storey entitled Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment.
Benjamin Storey
Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is concurrently a research professor at Furman University, where he previously served as Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs and director of the Tocqueville Program. At AEI, he focuses on political philosophy, civil society, and higher education, and he is the co-organizer of a conference series on the future of the American university.
In 2016–17, Dr. Storey was a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. From 2010 to 2012, he was the director of a National Endowment for the Humanities “Enduring Questions” course development project. He has also taught at the Hertog Political Studies Program, the Tikvah Fund, and the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale.
Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with his wife, Jenna Silber Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on a book titled, The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You For Life.
He has a Ph.D. and M.A. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
