Becoming Montaigne Seminar - “On Friendship”

Prof. Pauline Goul and Prof. Chad Córdova

This session will consist of a public and interactive close reading of the essay “De l’amitié” (On friendship); close reading as a technique or methodology is necessarily dialogic, predicated on the movement between text and reader, a sustained (re)interrogation and exploration of meaning co-produced by a reader or community of readers. The practice of public teaching has roots in antiquity, as well as in the medieval university, and we seek to bring to light for a contemporary public the possibilities that are opened up in the context of a porous, flexible, and dynamic learning community. The essay De l’amitié is particularly well-suited to this kind of collective work precisely because it examines questions of relationality, the bases of human connections, what it might mean to be or to have a friend.