Sections offered Spring 2021:
#30969 |
HERBERT MARKS |
MW 1:10-2:25pm |
WEB |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL Intensive Writing section
Above class meets 100% Online through Synchronous instruction. For more information visit https://fall2020.iu.edu/learning-modes/
“A classic is not a work that transcends time; on the contrary, it is a work that is disconcerting in any time, including its own.” In this course we shall read a series of works that have disconcerted readers through the ages—works that have shaped the categories in which we think and the values that mark our civilization. In challenging norms and stretching the boundaries of thought they revisit perennial questions about change and continuity, morality and expediency, freedom and fate. They encourage us to think in fresh ways about the costs of imperial power, the pain of exile, the burden of the past, and the sources of originality, love, and personal identity. We shall be focusing in succession on three largely independent streams of tradition: Greek drama and philosophy; Roman epic; and biblical “history.” In conclusion, we shall take up Dante’s Divine Comedy, the medieval summa to which all three contribute. Throughout we shall be reflecting on the dynamic movement of literary history, in which older “classics” are continually taken up and transformed.
Readings: Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle; selections from Plato; Virgil, The Aeneid; Ovid, The Metamorphoses; several books of the Bible (including Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospel of Mark); and selected cantos from The Divine Comedy by Dante, including all of Inferno.
This is a Writing Intensive class. Oral and written work will include class presentations and four or five short papers.
Students who have never read The Odyssey are strongly encouraged to do so over the Christmas break. I recommend the translation by Robert Fitzgerald (old edition Anchor Books, reprint Farrar, Straus and Giroux).