How Compassionate Are You?

Submitted by Ellwood Wiggins on

Germanics offered a new course in the winter: Sympathy for the Devil, taught by Ellwood Wiggins. Students studied the strategies of evoking sympathy in art and interrogated the ethics of sympathy in philosophy. At the link below, you will be able to see the creative parts of student projects, as well as detailed course and assignment descriptions. Each group was assigned one bad guy (Mass Murderer, Terrorist, Nazi, etc.), and they tried to elicit sympathy for their devil in four different genres: rhetoric (a speech); drama (a scene); narrative (a story); and visual media (art, film, etc.).

See the bad guys here.

Each week this summer, we will feature one of the bad guys from the student projects. See if their ploys for compassion work!  Let us know how successful they were: do you feel sympathy for their devil? Is it right to do so?

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