Courses:

Foundations of Western Culture I: Homer to Dante >> Content Detail



Syllabus



Syllabus

Course Format

This subject introduces the student to some of the literary, philosophical and religious texts which became major sources of assumption about the nature of the universe and mankind's place within it and which continue to underlie the characteristically Western sense of things to this day. In particular, the subject will study closely texts from two broad ranges of texts, those of ancient Greece and some major texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which rivals the tradition of the ancient world and in many ways contests with it. We begin with Homer's epic of home-coming, The Odyssey through Aeschylus's great trilogy of plays, The Orestia, which dramatizes the origin of Athenian justice and gives us a glimpse into the nature of ancient Greek theater (and also of the early modern conception of opera), two independent tragedies by Sophocles, the Antigone, widely regarded during the nineteenth century as the most important play ever written, and also the Oedipus Rex, one tragedy by Euripides, excerpts from the historian Thucydides's account of the great Peloponnesian War, which divided the ancient Greek world into two opposing camps, that of Athens and that of Sparta, in a manner not unlike the division between the United States and Soviet Russia during the period of the Cold War, and we conclude with examination of Plato's Repubic and excerpts from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the two founding texts of systematic ethical philosophy in the European world. We will then turn our attention to Judeo-Christian materials, the Book of Genesis and the Gospel according to St Matthew, and to a work of one of the early Fathers of the Christian church, St Augustine's Confessions, which recounts Augustine's spiritual rejection of classical culture and his rebirth as a Christian. The subject concludes by studying the first third of Dante Aleghieri's monumental Divine Comedy, the section dealing with the poet's journey through Hell. Dante's work is an apt conclusion, because it represents in literary form the medieval effort to unite the pagan and Christian heritages of Western civilization in a synthesis. In our discussions we will also examine the claims made in behalf of our texts that they are classics and we will explore some of the historical, literary, intellectual, and ethical significance that the question "what is a classic?" has had at different moments in the history of Western civilization.

The subject meets twice a week for two one-and-a-half sessions. Each session begins with a lecture of varying length, but changes over early into general discussion. Active participation in discussion is essential to the life of the class and the force and cogency of students' remarks will have a marked influence on grades. Readings will total approximately seventy-five pages a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Much of the grade will also depend upon the quality of the three written assignments required by the course, and spaced fairly evenly over the term: the papers will total twenty pages in entirety, two papers running to at least six pages each and a final paper running to at least eight pages. The papers will each deal with some aspect of the readings and discussion; topics may be invented by the students but an extensive list of suggested topics will be circulated two weeks in advance of each paper's due date for those students who require it. The first of these papers will be rewritten upon its return and resubmitted in a form complaint with corrections made by the instruction on the pages of the first version. The second paper may be treated in the same way, depending upon the instructor's judgment. The subject will also offer students opportunity for oral expression by reason of (a) its discussion format and (b) a division into groups of two or three students (depending upon enrollment), each of which will make two fifteen-minute presentations of materials conducive to the discussion of a given assignment, following the model of such presentations offered by the instructor at the outset of the term.

The maximum number of students per section of this subject is 18, except in cases where there are no sections and where a writing fellow is attached to the subject, in which case the enrollment can rise to 25. There will be no final examination.


 








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