5 courses with the subject GREK GR, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
This course is designed to provide incoming first-year graduate students in Classics with a small reading class that will allow a faculty instructor to assess students’ needs before they advance further into the graduate program
Prerequisites: at least four terms of Greek, or the equivalent. An intensive review of Greek syntax with translation of English sentences and paragraphs into Attic Greek
Who read the Iliad in antiquity (and how much of it)? Which plays of Euripides did people read the most? They say that the Greek novel was a popular genre: was it? And if so, which ones were people reading? What can we say about how people read Greek literature from the manuscripts that remain, as well as the various summaries, glosses, and commentaries that were read alongside them? It should go without saying that people did not read only what survived to be canonized in later periods as the “classics” of ancient Greek literature: how did all the other literary texts they read affect the way we think they read our “classics,” or, conversely, how and to what extent did our “classics” influence the literature that they read but failed to make the leap to our subsequent manuscript tradition? One can look on the papyri that survive from Greco-Roman Egypt as a literary Burgess Shale: it preserves an entire literary ecosystem, including both the ancestors of medieval manuscripts and a mass of textual fossils--and even whole genres--that were, from a literary history perspective, evolutionary dead-ends. This class explores the literary and sub-literary texts that survive from Greco-Roman Egypt with the aims of (1) reconstructing something of the literary ecology of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, and (2) reintegrating canonical classical Greek authors and works in the context of that ecology in which they were copied, read, studied, taught, and performed. In its fully realized expression, such a project of reconstruction and reintegration would take into account not only Greek literary and sub-literary production, but also all the texts in other languages and scripts (e.g., Egyptian, Latin, Aramaic, etc.) that once roamed the literary landscape, including Christian theological and documentary texts. There is, however, good reason to believe that the Greek literary graphomene of Egypt (as well as other regions of the Greek East) was in fact relatively self-contained, almost an island sub-ecology, and as such represents a coherent and profitable object of study. The course will begin with an introduction to Greco-Roman Egypt and what we know about books, book production, literacy, education, libraries, and the reading culture(s) of the region. We will then take the case of the Homeric epics as a case study in reconstructing how a specific author, text or genre was read in antiquity, before devoting individual sessions to some of the following topics: occasional poetry, court room or trial literature, hymns, biographies and lives, epistolography, novels, performance texts, and other, non-canonical genres. In many cases, we will take the opportunity to explore the fluid boundaries, generically and formally (i.e., mise en page), between literary, sub-literary, and documentary texts (e.g., documentary and literary letters or documentary trial transcripts and the Acta Alexandrinorum). Each class will require students to read transcriptions of Greek papyri (in Greek), study select images of papyri, and read secondary literature. We will also learn how to navigate digital collections and employ various tools to find specific genres, authors, and texts, and to establish and characterize papyrological corpora of the same
This seminar sets Homer's Iliad and Sappho's lyric poems in relation to each other around topics involving time – including narrative time, beginnings and endings, timeliness, and temporality, as well as rhythm and tempo, syncopation, bodily timing and performance, and chronotopic dynamics. It proposes to think as well about textual time, meaning both how different genres orchestrate time and tempo but also how these authors are treated in ancient and modern reception. We will read theoretical studies of time and temporality, the event, and periodicity, as well as those more focused on genre and occasional performance. Discussions will center around close attendance on specific images and dynamics in the ancient texts, as well as the ways in which theoretical frames may illuminate these. Thus, for instance, seminars juxtapose the epic punctuation of bodies in space with Sappho's female lovers on the move, with scholarly readings deployed to critique the epic-lyric divide around these dynamics. A central and recurrent figure in this scheme is Helen, who is presented in Homeric epic as the central catalyst for the violent unfolding of events (i.e., the Trojan War) and who functions in lyric poetry as a cathexis for the violent consequences of desire
This course examines the three dramatic genres of fifth-century BCE Athens – tragedy, comedy, and satyr play – alongside one another. Even though these genres were often performed on the same stage and sometimes at the same festival, modern scholars have tended to treat them separately. Each week we will instead allow these distinct forms of drama to intersect by close reading substantial selections from a tragedy, a comedy, and a satyr play under a particular theme or topic. This will allow us to explore the insights and resonances that emerge at the intersection between these genres, as we consider commonalities and differences between dramatic genres, as well as how Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Cratinus, Eupolis, Euripides, Sophocles and others handled dramatic structures, myth, politics, religion, and staging. Our aim is to gain insight into the intricacies of ancient Greek theater and the boundaries that modern scholars have drawn between these sibling genres. Because most satyr play – as well as the comedies of Cratinus and Eupolis – survives in fragments we will additionally explore the challenges and opportunities of working with fragmentary drama. While our focus will be on the primary texts, the assigned secondary reading will also introduce students to a range of key areas of focus such as the city, the chorus, and gods as well as to various recent approaches related to theories of embodiment, materiality, and cognition. This broad-ranging approach is designed not only to familiarize students with the theoretical landscape of Greek drama of the last twenty-five years but also to encourage advanced exploration of ancient Greek theater through a range of critical approaches and methodologies
Source: Barnard College's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
