9:30-10:45A    MW    SY022

This section is an Intensive Writing course and requires registration
in COAS W333.

"What is Man?"
Mark Twain facetiously defined a "classic" as a "book" which people
praise and don't read." Whatever people do in fact, genuine classics
have that status because people ought to read them; and the reason for
that "ought" is that great books, no matter when they were written,
continue to speak relevantly to persons in other, later ages. In this
course we shall read works which span an enormous period of human
history. Going well past the usual beginning of great books courses as
taught in the USA or Europe, I want to start off with the GILGAMESH
epic, which in its present form was composed in the Near East sometime
in the early second millennium B.C.; and I propose to end with the
first (and, undoubtedly, the most widely read) part of Dante's great
DIVINE COMEDY -- namely, the INFERNO -- which was composed around
1300. Between that unusual starting point and that end we shall look
at a number of famous works from ancient Greece and Rome, at
selections from the Bible, and then from several of the greatest works
of the (Christian) Middle Ages. In order that this course would not
turn out to be yet another one devoted exclusively to the works of
"dead white males" (however great those authors may have been), I have
included also a classic of Chinese Taoist philosophy and a work from
the Middle Ages in which, in addition to letters from the philosopher
Abelard, there are also wonderful letters from his beloved, the nun
Heloise. These different authors address the perennial questions of
human existence: What is it to be a human being really? Are we free to
pursue our lives as we ourselves see fit? If so, is there a best kind
of life for all human beings? Is/are there some divine being(s); and
if, so, what is or ought to be our relation to divine being(s)?
Not only does each of the works selected speak (eloquently, I hope) to
us today, but very many of them spoke also to later writers in the
group with which we shall be concerned. Part of what makes a work a
classic is that it becomes influential on or with later writers. It is
fascinating to observe this process of creative appropriation -- when,
for example, the story of the flood in GILGAMESH is later echoed in
the bible's account of Noah and the flood, or when Homer's ODYSSEY
(along with the ILIAD) becomes the model for Virgil's AENEID, or when
the speculative geography of the underworld offered by Plato at the
end of his dialogue known as the PHAEDO appears in Dante's INFERNO, a
work where in the Roman poet Virgil serves the author as his guide
through the various divisions of Hell.
Although the latest of the works to be assigned in this course dates
from approximately 1300, at least many of those works have been
creatively appropriated -- have been "minded," if you like--but much
more recent authors, in the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The
final individualized project for the course will, accordingly, be for
each student to find, with my help, some such relatively recent work
(an obvious example is Joyce's ULYSSES,) inspired by one of the works
which all of us will read and discuss together, and to write a paper
about the way(s) in which the more recent work deals with material
which it derives from one or another of those much older books.
Course Texts:
------, GILGAMESH
Homer, ODYSSEY
Sophocles, OEDIPUS REX, ANTIGONE
Aristophanes, THE CLOUDS
Plato, APOLOGY, PHAEDO
Chuang-Tzu, THE [TESTS OF] CHUANG-TZU
Virgil, AENEID
Plutarch, PARALLEL LIVES (selections only)
------, BIBLE (selections from Old and New Testaments)
Augustine, CONFESSIONS
Abelard and Heloise, THE LETTERS
Dante, Interno
Requirements:
2 essays, 3-5 pages in length
final essay (as described above), approximately 10 pages
consistent attendance and participation in class