REMEMBER THAT FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES, THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT HAS A STUDENT CURRICULUM LINK ( best web sites) THAT YOU MAY USE TO ACCESS HOME PAGES FOR EVERY MAJOR AUTHOR AND LITERARY PERIOD.

Please print out the appropriate material and bring it to class on the assigned due dates. As the course progresses, more material for subsequent literary periods will be added. You may refer to the index below to find the material you want more efficiently.

Introduction to the course
Introduction to the course and initial assignment

Classical Period: Ancient Greece
Introduction to Mythology and The Odyssey: structure and themes
The Greek National Character
An introduction to the study of philosophy, Plato's Republic and an Internet research assignment
Aristotle's Poetics and Oedipus

Biblical Period
Introduction to the Book of Job and assignment

Medieval Period
Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales: The Pardoner and the problem of evil
See also my British Literature Home Page for Chaucer

Renaissance Period.

For Shakespeare and related Renaissance studies including links to the Shakepseare play (s) we will do in this class, your assignment is to consult my British Literature Home Page, and my Shakespeare Home Page to locate the needed materials.

The Romantic and Modern Periods: the Star Wars Myth
Myth and the problem of evil. FINAL SUMMARY AND ASSIGNMENTS

The Modern Period ...Prose Fiction
Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code with references to Jung, Conrad, Shakespeare, Luther, Coleridge, Martin Luther King, Eric Hoffer, Joseph Campbell and others

Text:

An excellent secondary source text for this course would be Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Her perspective synthesizes the classical period with the modern era suggesting that our present social, educational, political and moral sensibilities might well be refined by referencing the "ancients." She notes,

1-Philosophical questioning arises wherever people are...Philosophy breaks out wherever people are encouraged to think for themselves." (p. 17)

2-...[the] failure to think critically produces a democracy in which people talk at one another but never have a genuine dialogue." (p. 19) --See Plato on the dialectic and Pericles.

3-The distinctive contribution of Socrates was to bring sustained unrelenting philosophical argument to bear on these issues of communal concern..." (p. 20)

--So Pericles had his war, and we have ours today...Philosophical inquiry requires the mind to take charge of its own thought (Nussbaum) and dialogue...

English Department

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