This course examines foundational literary works from the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Medieval Europe. We’ll consider these works as sources of some very long-lasting traditions in the representation of love, desire, conflict, justice, the quest for knowledge, the scope or limits of human action, human relations with the divine and animal realms. Works to be considered will most likely include:
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Aeschylus’s Oresteia; Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone; Euripides’s The Bacchae; Virgil’s Aeneid; and Dante’s Inferno.
As a CI-H class, 21L.001 will devote considerable attention to student writing and speaking. There will be a number of short essays and at least one formal oral report per student.