World Mythologies in the Arts

Catalog description

This course is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, historical, and contemporary examination of myth as it appears in the visual arts, literature, and film. Each iteration of the course covers myths in the arts of at least several of the following cultures-Greek and Roman, Celtic, Norse, European, Egyptian, Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Pacific, African, and Native American. The course is thematic and intercultural, for example in the way myths are told in historical cultures and then retold and transformed in art, literature, and films in later cultures. Thus, the course considers in what ways myths are reconceived and altered when they appear in later cultures and in different media within the arts. The course is not a survey of world mythologies, but an interdisciplinary examination of myths and mythic themes and images in the arts (such as painting and film) and literature, with an emphasis on the interpretations and transformative processes applicable to myths as they are (sometimes radically) altered and embodied in art forms that may be far removed in time, place, and meaning from the original contexts of the myths themselves. The course is intended to familiarize students with the ways that different cultures have interpreted the world in which they live-how cultures created their own explanations for phenomena they could not understand, and how contemporary culture gives new life to older myths. The course examines such questions as the meanings of myths as represented in the arts, the various purposes of myths in the arts, such as the functions of creation myths and myths of the hero; theories of how myths originate; and ways that myths have been analyzed, interpreted, and adapted in other cultures through the arts. Students learn to compare and contrast myths in the arts, discuss common elements in myths in the arts, and to interpret the meaning of the myths both within the cultural and historical context in which they were created and the ways they are reinterpreted in later cultures in the arts.