World Literature: Antiquity to Middle Ages

This course studies the seminal texts of Western civilization from the Jewish, Classical, Christian, and Germanic worlds that together form the foundation of modern thought and life. Without these works, we would literally not be who we are. They define us and the way we look at ourselves, raising questions we continue to ask, such as: What does it mean to be godly or ungodly? To be good or evil? To be part of history or to stand outside it? To live in harmony with nature and its creator or creators? These questions have never gone away and they appear in their clearest light in the literary and social contexts in which they first were asked. The class reads Genesis, Homer's The Odyssey, Sophocles's Oedipus the King, Plato's Apology, the Book of Job, Virgil's The Aeneid, selections from the New Testament, Augustine's Confessions, and Beowulf.