Regular Class Meeting Times

MW 4 - 5:20 p.m

Bolton 102

Monsters, dangerous women and boat loads of heroes looking for action – the Odyssey and Argonautica are too hard to resist! In this course, students will learn the meter, vocabulary, morphology, grammar and syntax of ancient Greek epic dialect as they read selections from the poetry of Homer and Apollonius of Rhodes. Students will be introduced to scholarly debates about the performance and production contexts of these epics, in particular the distinctions between local vs pan-Hellenic and oral vs written epic poetry. They will learn how to analyze these texts, using traditional philological and literary critical tools and approaches, including textual criticism and philological analysis, narratology and discourse analysis, and genre theory. Since these two epics are about voyages around the world, students will also apply more innovative approaches involving spatial thinking as another way consider how these epics may have functioned in their cultural contexts. Spatial thinking will be especially interesting as we consider how these epics represent the complexity of ancient Greek notions about the relationship between ethnic identity and geography.