LIT-125 Literary Classics and Western Culture FA2 (3)

This course engages the arguments about culture within literary classics. The literary texts known as “classics” and the Western European cultures that produced them help to transmit, maintain, and at times transform cultural values whenever and wherever they are read and discussed. The course studies literature from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and into the modern world in terms of the dominant cultures in which they emerged, the different meanings they have accrued over the centuries, and the ways they have been revised and reimagined in more recent texts in different contexts and according to different cultural values. Through reading of literary texts, discussion, and writing critical essays, students engage with questions of value, power relationships, knowledge creation, and the dynamic role played by cultural forms in these processes. AU Core Habits of Mind: Cultural Inquiry. Usually Offered: fall and spring.