Class will meet twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays (11-12:20pm). There will be weekly assignments as stated in the syllabus. Your grade for this course will be depend on a two midterms (25% each), class participation (20%: 10% attendance, 10% participation), and a final project (30%). Exams will be scheduled in advance and no make-up exams will be given without medical documentation. No classes can be missed without prior agreement from the Instructor and, if need be, medical documentation. Midterms will be graded on the following criteria: better grades will be awarded to greater amounts of factual correctness, higher levels of detail demonstrating mastery of Homer's poems, imaginativeness, fluency of style and grammar, lack of spelling errors, and so on. Extra credit will be given to anyone who can correctly identify who the REAL Homer was ; - )  (this will make sense after the first two lectures). Midterm I will be in-class. Midterm II will be take-home, due on Thursday, March 3.  Class participation will be assessed according to attendance and active participation in discussions. Talking during class, not paying attention, doing anything else than participating in the lecture or discussion count as missing a class. Missing a single class will bring your grade down by 3%. Two classes missed will bring your grade down by 6%. You don't want to "miss" classes. Active participation means volunteering your thoughts to the discussion. Please note, no thought will be considered wrong when it is volunteered in the spirit of promoting class discussion!  Final projects will be individual or group (limit of 3 students per group). The purpose of these is to get you to think creatively about the materials covered in class and to express yourselves in any medium.  Projects can take the form of: a website on tragedy, or a tragedian, or some aspect of either an annotated collection of images, novels (by title with summaries), or poems, etc., of/about tragedy, or some tragic character or event, from any or various time periods a video, theatrical (taped, videoed, live), or music production of your own inspired by tragedy from around the world, including non-Western world artwork of your own design (e.g., stage setting to accompany a play) a modern-day tragedy a study of any art, poetry, translations, philosophies, political theories, criticism inspired by tragedy in, say, the 19th or 20th century a survey of the archaeology of Athens or Aphrodisias, esp. its most recent excavations a traditional paper on any aspect of any materials covered in class (gods, myths, war ethic, ethics, women, cleverness in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, etc.) Grading for projects will be based on a number of factors: effort (hours of work put into the project; if you are in a group, I will determine percentage of effort) and originality will count most, but, as with your midterms,better grades will be awarded to greater amounts of factual correctness, higher levels of detail demonstrating mastery of your chosen materials, imaginativeness, fluency of style and grammar (where applicable), lack of spelling errors (where applicable), and so on. We will begin discussing projects February 19. You will be presenting your initial ideas in class that day, so be ready to have something to present then (and if you are going to work in a group, locate group members before then). Final project-presentation will take place during the last week+ of classes. Everyone starts this class off with an A+. It is up to you to maintain that average! See this page for the UCI Academic Honesty Policy and other related matters.