Course Details

Course offered Autumn 2018

HONORS 210 B: The Classical Tradition (A&H)

HONORS 210 B: The Classical Tradition (A&H)

SLN 15873 (View UW registration info »)

Stephen Hinds (Classics)
Office: 262 Denny, Box 353110
Phone: 206 543-2266
Email: shinds@uw.edu

Credits: 5
Limit: 35 students

Honors Credit Type

6 spots reserved for incoming freshmen students.
The Greek and Roman imagination has fed literature, art and thought in the Western world and beyond from antiquity until today: the god and the hero, the warrior and the wanderer, the lover and the schemer, the statesman and the dissident, the city-builder and the seeker of rural fantasy … Poets, artists, thinkers and doers, all stake-holders in the Classical Tradition.

Presupposing no prior study of what we know as classical antiquity (a shorthand term for the ethnically diverse and multicultural worlds unified by the use of the Greek and Latin languages on all sides of the Mediterranean Sea from about 1000 BCE/BC to 500 CE/AD), the course will offer the opportunity to explore conversations across centuries between ancient and modern texts and ideas, especially in poetry but in other textual genres and in other media too. For classicists like myself, antiquity ends in the 5th or 6th century CE, and on some definitions modernity begins as early as the 14th century CE; in between lie the Middle Ages (the medieval period), whose boundaries are themselves negotiable. Although this class will of course pick and choose its particular objects of study, in principle no period of culture influenced by ancient Greece and Rome is irrelevant to our investigation. What will unify our explorations are, first, a consistent grounding in ancient Greek and Roman texts and ideas and, second, our own perspectives as 21st century readers living in increasingly diverse and interconnected societies, trying to make sense of conversations across two and even three millennia of Western culture and to put them in conversation with other world cultures and traditions on which they have had an impact. ‘Classical’ and ‘tradition’ are both highly loaded terms: to study the Classical Tradition is to investigate, and to be ready to problematize, a long history of cultural appropriation and identity formation.