The Classical Origins of Western Literature

Catalog description

The poets and writers of ancient Greece and Rome created countless innovations in their literary works that became the inheritance of Western culture. These range from narrative techniques like flashbacks, found already in Homer, to the creation of meaning through sustained allegory, to the development of genres and tones like the macabre. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the range of classical literature by surveying key innovations that continue to make Greek and Roman literature exciting, and that have influenced the work of centuries of writers in the Western tradition down to the present.