Description: |
This course addresses the Big Questions: Love, Death, War, Sex, Law, and more besides. We’ll come to our readings through myth and history, art and philosophy, and a series of broad conceptual frameworks. Above all, however, this is a course in literary appreciation and influence: we will read extensively in Homer and Virgil, in dialogues by Plato, in a broad selection of Greek tragedy (and one comedy!), in a generous selection from Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Our aim will be to encounter these as challenging, imaginative, absorbing, and enduring attempts to confront, articulate, and share the possibilities of life. We will try to do justice to these texts in their own distinctive terms, but we will strive as well to see why readers before us have prized them so highly for thousands of years, and how we are to make sense of them in the 21st century. The readings are astonishingly rich and rewarding, and we will do our best to live up to them within the limits of a semester's work. First years welcome! |