NEH Enduring Questions Course on "What Is Friendship?"

FAIN: AQ-50879-13

Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY 11549-1000)
Simon R. Doubleday (Project Director: September 2012 to June 2019)

The development of an introductory course that would explore the history of the question, What is friendship?, from ancient Mesopotamia to social networks.

What light can the history of societies from the recent and distant past shed on the very nature of friendship, its value, and its potential? This course, which will be offered by the History Department at Hofstra University and will be open to all undergraduates, will ask how people have questioned, understood, and experienced friendship in a diverse variety of other times and places - including ancient China, Greco-Roman antiquity, Enlightenment France, and twentieth-century Chile - and how we might correspondingly rethink our own experiences. It will also ask how historical evidence - as well as literature and philosophy - may prove fruitful in addressing these seemingly perennial concerns. Linking the core readings will be a wide range of personal correspondence, real and occasionally fictional, from ancient Cuneiform tablets and the letters of Seneca to the exchanges between two modern Latin American writers in exile and the contemporary epistolary novel.