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Course Overview |
Course Overview.
In this course we will examine the roots of Western culture in ancient, premodern
texts of mythic epic, philosophy and religion. We hopefully will take the
opportunity to reach deep behind today's materialistic consumer culture
to find important thematic strands of narratives that helped to form European
culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Greek, Roman and Celtic
mythology and heroic epic; Greek philosophy; Judaism; Christianity; medieval
romance.These texts include approaches to life that challenge our current
scientific and technocentric worldview with differing views on what it means
to be human, to live in a community, to find a noble path in life.
Because this is a seminar, it is a small, intensive, discussion-based course that involves
a heavy load of reading and writing. Its success and your own largely depends on you. Late reading
responses will not be accepted, and late essays will be graded down. A large part of your semester
grade will be based on your preparation for seminar discussions and your involvement in them. Check
your prejudices but not your convictions at the door, leave behind high-school-style five-point
essays, and be prepared for in-depth analysis and application of ancient texts to our lives and
values today.
A few of the important questions that we'll be addressing:
How well do we live up to our heritage as a civilization?
What are the moral strengths and weak points of that heritage?
Is "Western Civilization" a meaningful concept?
What is the cultural source of our modern sense of individualism?
How does the Bible relate to modern controversies over gender and definitions of life?
Why is Plato a source for both left-wing and neoconservative thought today?
What is a tradition and how is tradition valuable or not in twenty-first-century America?
How does the sense of "reason" and "divinity" differ in ancient times from our own?
Does the meaning of texts now differ from then?
How can we relate a popular modern epic like The Lord of the Rings to the ancient
literature from which it borrows?
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