Classics

The visual arts and architecture constitute a central part of human expression and experience, both growing from and influencing our lives in profound ways that we might not consciously acknowledge. We will explore intersections between the visual arts and cultural, political, and social history with the goal of using art-history methods and theories to deal critically with works of art. This course is not a survey; rather, it will include a limited number of artists and works of art and architecture, which students will learn about in depth through formal analysis, readings, discussion, research, and debate. We will endeavor to understand each work from the point of view of its creators and patrons and by following its changing reception by audiences throughout time, including the ways in which those changes evoke political and social meanings. To accomplish this, we will need to understand some of the languages of art. The course, then, is also a course in visual literacy: the craft of reading and interpreting visual images on their own terms. We will also discuss a number of issues of contemporary concern; for instance, the destruction of art, free speech and respect of religion, the art market, and the museum.

This course will provide an intensive introduction to Ancient Greek grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, with the aim of reading the language as soon as possible. By fall mid-semester, students will be reading authentic excerpts of Ancient Greek poetry and prose. Students will also read and discuss English translations of selected works of Plato, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Pseudo-Xenophon. In spring, while continuing to refine their knowledge of Greek grammar and their reading skills, students will read extended selections of Plato’s Apology in the original Greek. Biweekly individual conferences with the instructor, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

In this course, students will develop their comprehension of Latin grammar, vocabulary, word inflection patterns, and syntax by close reading of selected works of Catullus and Cicero in fall and Ovid and Livy in spring. The ancient Roman Republic lasted 450 years before imploding into a military dictatorship. The democratic republic in the United States, modeled on the ancient Roman Republic, has lasted just 237 years and now confronts forces threatening to replace it with dictatorship or some form of authoritarian populism. Examining works of poetry and prose, both accompanying and following the advent of autocracy in ancient Rome, we will consider the value and limits of literature for exposing, challenging, or affirming hierarchical and tyrannical ideals, institutions, and norms.

Where and how did democratic ideals emerge? Throughout the history of the world, hierarchies of power and privilege have predominated. Democracy is not the norm. Democracy is the bizarre exception. But 3,000 years ago, ancient Greek epic poetry began to undermine the moral validity of political hierarchies and tyrannical abuses of power. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, ancient Greek literature cultivated ideals of humanity, equality, and justice vital to sustaining humane, egalitarian values, norms, and institutions. Over centuries, ancient Greeks came to understand—as by now we must—that not only individuals but also groups, both large and small, can wield power tyrannically by using violence and intimidation to subjugate others and silence dissenting opinions. Reading selected works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, and others, we will investigate how and why the Greeks developed democratic ideals, why they themselves failed to attain them, and how we might do better. This course is reading- and writing-intensive. We will also encounter ideas that are uncomfortable and troubling in various predictable and unpredictable ways. The course is designed for anyone who welcomes open-minded critical inquiry and is eager to read and calmly discuss texts that are challenging, both intellectually and emotionally. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself—a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, and costumes alongside scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we will study these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose lifespan is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare will be our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I will be our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries will be our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings, from within Shakespeare’s Wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film, will be our work. 

What if the roots of English literature were not wholly English? How were the origins of Italian literature pollinated with Arabic philosophy? This course will explore these questions and more through two foundational texts—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Often read in isolation, we will instead study these works together—in historical, intellectual, and comparative context—charting how the high tide of Italian literary culture reached the shores of medieval England, how Dante’s vernacular epic of the afterlife helped shape Chaucer’s vernacular epic of earthly life. In fall, we will focus on Dante, treating his formation as a poet and thinker as a window into the formation of Italian literature itself. We will explore his engagement with the Occitan, Sicilian, and Tuscan lyric traditions; his reading of Aristotle through Arabic and Latin commentators; and his response to the burgeoning—and fraught—political and intellectual climate of medieval Florence. Having immersed ourselves in the life, times, and mind of Dante, we will then turn to the Comedy itself, reading all three canticles—the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with special attention to Dante’s evolving understanding of love and desire. In spring, we will turn to Chaucer and his role in inaugurating vernacular English literature through a rich, self-conscious dialogue with Dante and the other “corone,” or crowns, of Italian literature—Boccaccio and Petrarch. Chaucer’s travels to Genoa and Florence in 1373 and Milan in 1378 were formative for him as a person and poet. At a time when hardly anyone in England had heard of Dante, Boccaccio, or Petrarch, Chaucer read them in the original and responded to them by creating new literary forms. In doing so, Chaucer fashioned a future English literary audience; in a real sense, he wrote for us. We will read Chaucer’s House of Fame (a direct response to the Comedy) and Canterbury Tales, pairing each tale with its Italian analogues and influences. Throughout the year, we will practice comparative reading and source study, mapping how ideas and literary forms travel across, cultures, languages, and borders. In the process, we will encounter the profoundly interconnected intellectual world of Dante’s and Chaucer’s Middle Ages.

What is in a feeling, and what does it do? This course will explore how medieval writers understood the emotions—what they called the passions—as forces that move the soul, affect the mind, transform the body, and raise pressing questions about free will and moral responsibility. Because the passions operate at the threshold of the soul and body, virtually every domain of medieval thought had something to say about them—from poetry and medicine to philosophy and contemplative devotion. For instance, physicians like Peter of Spain diagnosed lovesickness and melancholia as genuine medical conditions. Philosophers like Aquinas compiled catalogues of the passions—from joy and sorrow to fear and courage to despair and hope—and offered phenomenological descriptions of how the passions arise through both embodied sensation and ensouled experience. Occitan troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Italian lyric poets like Cavalcanti and Dante could write of love as the bondage of mind and will or the source of ethical nobility and spiritual freedom. (Dante did both.) Mystics like Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich explored how emotional awareness could be refined into subtler modes of spiritual attention and how, at the same time, the inmost experience of divine love could be expressed as ecstatic, passionate feeling. In addition to the themes and writers above, this course will examine how the passions open onto questions of habitus and disposition—how repeated action shapes how we feel and how the way we repeatedly feel shapes our action. We will also consider how emotion is at the center of vice and virtue—how the quality of our feeling determines the quality of our inner life and our life with others. With the help of contemporary scholarship, we will approach the medieval passions with historical and phenomenological methods of analysis. Through these lenses, we will see how the passions in the Middle Ages serve as a unique site for comparative intellectual history, spanning disciplines and bridging ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. At the same time, studying the medieval passions offers something more personal: the chance to recover forms of feeling and attention from the past that might expand the borders of our own in the present.

Few people dispute the enormous impact that the Ancient Greeks have had on Western culture—and even on the modern world, in general. This seminar will introduce the interested student to this culture, mainly through reading salient primary texts in English translation. Our interest will range broadly. Along with some background reading, we will discuss mythology (Hesiod), epic hymns and poetry (Homer), history (Herodotus), politics, religion, and philosophy. By the end of the course, students should have a basic understanding of the cultural contribution of the Ancient Greeks, as well as a basic timeline of their history through the Hellenistic age. 

This course will examine and produce a range of work—from the journalistic to the critical, from the practical to the mystical, from the factual to the fictional—in the vast landscape of arts writing. We will write short pieces along the lines of liner notes, catalogue copy for gallery shows, and short reviews. We will approach long reviews, critical essays, and deep and subjective interior meditations on our experience of artists and their work by reading broadly across time. Topics may include, but are not limited to: Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on themselves; Friedrich Nietzsche on Richard Wagner; Theodor W. Adorno via Thomas Mann on Beethoven’s Opus 111; V. S. Naipaul on Gustave Flaubert; Amiri Baraka on Billie Holiday; Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy; Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand; Mark Strand on Edward Hopper; Rosalind Krauss on photography; Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl; Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray; Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah; the art criticism of Donald Judd; and contemporary phenomena such as fan fiction, crossovers, and alternate universes made up of familiar literary characters. Students should feel confident in their familiarity with one or two art forms, broadly understood, and should expect, along with the reading, to write several small and two larger (7-12 pages) pieces to be presented to the entire class. Conference work will comprise research projects on those artists or works of art, or both, that students, in consultation with the instructor, decide on as their special province.