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 »)
Credits: 5
Limit: 35 students
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.