Reading the Classics

Catalog description

In this course we will study the early roots of Western culture--the Biblical, Greek and Roman traditions--as well as how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European authors reproduced, rethought and reshaped these early traditions. Instead of reading and discussing the required texts according to the date when they were written (first the early traditions and ending with the Renaissance views), we will focus our attention on a few themes that were central concerns to those living in Classic and Renaissance times, and that continue to influence modern ways of thinking and acting in Western societies: conceptions of God and the place of religion in society; nature of power and authority, and individuals' rights and duties; good, evil, and ethical philosophy; views on women, their nature and roles in society; ethnography and the perception of other cultures and societies. In addition to reading and discussing several of the biblical books--Genesis, Exodus, the Book on Revelation--we will study other seminal classical works--Sophocles' Antigone, Aristotle's Politics and Ethics, Herodotus' The Histories; Plato's Apology-- and works by Michel de Montaigne, Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, Marie de Gournay, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and several others. We will also work with books published in the last decades, analyzing the classics and and their reception in various periods of history, but also books that analyze what the classics tell us today--Dreyfus and Kelly's All things shining, Reading the Western Classics to find meaning in a secular Age; Anthony Grafton's Bring Out Your Dead: the Past as Revelation; James Miller, Examined Lives, from Socrates to Nietzsche; and Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.