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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
In the ancient Greek and Roman world, comedy was one vehicle for exploring the fantasies, tensions, and dangers of communal life. Students read the comedies of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence and explore the evolution of ancient comedy as a genre. Students also examine issues of class, gender, and politics (as focused through the lens of comedy) and consider some of the theoretical aspects of humor itself-what makes these comedies funny today?
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4.00 Credits
An intensive, semesterlong reading of Homer's Odyssey. This course is designed to introduce first-year students to more profound and sophisticated techniques of reading and thinking about texts than they have thus far encountered. After two sessions, in which students are introduced to the issues particular both to this genre (the archaic Greek world, oral composition, the Homeric Question) and to this particular text, they read through the epic at a rate of two books per week. The semester concludes with a look back at literary and cultural issues raised by this essential document of the Western tradition: travel as a narrative vehicle for (self-)discovery and the competing satisfactions of the journey and the arrival.
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4.00 Credits
The last generations of the Roman Republic experienced widespread social change resulting from dispossessions and the loss of traditional lifeways in Italy, sanctioned exploitation abroad, and increasingly intense and varied cultural contacts throughout an expanding empire. Roman authors of the period responded to these "consequences of conquest" by fashioning Latinliterary languages in diverse genres. This combination of ongoing change and linguistic experi- mentation brought problems of its own. What is the relationship between language and lived experience? What uses of language, and who among its users, are able to bring about change in politics, the economy, society, or culture? Topics covered include Latin literary history; late Roman Republican politics, society, and culture; and linguistic and cultural pluralism, purity, and policy. Readings, all in English, are drawn from Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Lucretius, and Sallust, as well as from modern historiography and literary criticism.
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4.00 Credits
An introduction to selected myths of ancient Greece and Rome, through texts in a variety of genres-epic, lyric, dramatic, and ancient prose summaries. Subjects addressed include the principal activities in which gods, heroes, and mortals all engage and can thus be compared (war, for example, in the sky and on the earth); speech (how gods address mortals, and the hymns and prayers with which the ancients addressed their gods); love (between gods and humans as well as within each group). Readings (all in English translation) are largely of primary texts from Greek and Roman literature, with occasional texts for comparison from two other sets of cultures: the Indo-European cousins of the Greeks and Romans, e.g., Sanskrit, Norse and Irish texts; and the complex Near Eastern civilizations with whom they interacted, primarily Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts.
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4.00 Credits
In 1949 the German philosopher Karl Jaspers fashioned the phrase "the Axial Age" to describethe "spiritual process" that occurred between 800and 200 B.C.E. across Eurasia, with a common axis in the period around 500 B.C.E. Since at least the mid-1800s C.E., scholars have wondered whether it is more than coincidence that in those centuries Confucius and the "hundred schools" appeared in China, the Upanishads and the Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, the principal prophets in Israel, and the philosophers in Greece. This course critically explores the interrelation of cosmology and ethics in the Axial Age. Readings from the five cultures at issue (Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Indian, Chinese) include major texts of the principal thinkers, as well as samples of earlier texts that were being reinterpreted or challenged. Students also examine what parts of the ethical legacy of these thinkers are still influential today.
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4.00 Credits
In this course, students are required to give speeches in various genres, from presentation of information before small groups to formal addresses recommending courses of action to deliberative assemblies. Videos of the speeches given are used in the critiquing process. Students also study the texts of actual orations and theoretical treatises on the nature of rhetoric by authors and orators such as Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr. Time is spent examining tapes and videos of important speeches of the last century. One section of the class constitutes a "virtual campus" course that meets, through videoconferencing, with students at Smolny College in St. Petersburg. In the course of giving speeches for each other, Smolny and Bard students reflect on differences in the public speaking traditions of Russia and the Anglophone world.
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4.00 Credits
Meanings found in athletics have stirred meditations by poets in many cultures and genres. This course addresses the strange intersections of the physical, the social, and the sacred recognized in sports. It allots equal time to three sets of readings: (1) victory odes for the ancient Greek games, principally those of Pindar, the great lyric poet of the West; (2) case studies of the wedding of poetry to athletics in other cultures around the world, as in songs for Hawaiian royal surfing festivals and tales of the foundational ball game in the Mayan Popol Vuh; (3) an anthology of sports poetry in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America. Readings also include scholarship by sports historians. All readings are in English.
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4.00 Credits
Linguists and archaeologists have a rough agreement that there existed a people speaking a language called Proto-Indo-European. There is little consensus about that people's original homeland, or the timing or causes for its migrations as far as the Indus Valley at one extreme and Ireland at the other. What can be agreed upon most readily from the linguistic evidence is that they shared not merely a common language and social structures but also common literary genres, principally epic and lyric, in which there are signs of common metaphors and even meters. Hence it is possible to compare passages from epics that originated in oral traditions and later crystallized into such texts as the Mahabharata and Ramayana in India, the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greece, the Norse Elder Edda, and the Irish Táin Bó Cúailng e. All textare read in English.
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4.00 Credits
See History 277 for a course description.
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4.00 Credits
"I tried time and again to write prose, / but each time a poem appeared on its own, and / whatever I tried to say was poetry." So Ovid describes himself as a natural poet. Topics in this course, which covers all of Ovid, include poetic genres; Greco- Roman mythology; the characteristic Roman practice of "competitive imitation"; the equallyRoman and surprisingly modern ideal of witty or figured speech; and the very human experience, captured especially by Ovid's last works, of loneliness, alienation, and the fear of being forgotten in death. All readings are in English; optional concurrent tutorial on select passages in the original Latin. Prerequisites: moderated junior or senior standing and consultation with instructor.
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