EH 207 Readings in Literature and Culture

EH 207 Literature and Culture teaches critical analysis of texts from ancient times through the Age of Discovery. This course introduces students to the methods of literary study through an examination of works in their social, historical, and philosophical contexts. We will examine different genres such as poetry, prose fiction, and drama and oral literatures. Our readings will consist mainly of works in translation but will also include texts first written in English. We will explore modes of normative identity set against the abnormal and the monstrous. We will examine how these texts, and the cultures that produced them, establish and/or call into question various political, religious, and cultural systems from ancient times to the sixteenth century. We will question how and why our ideas of the monster shape and govern our own normative models and how movement across diverse cultural spaces destabilizes these models in profound moments of cultural contact. Our texts will include, among other, the ancient Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh, the fifth-century BCE drama Oedipus Tyrannus, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, the eleventh-century French Song of Roland, and the seventeenth-century tragedy Macbeth, among other works

Final Exam :

Thursday April 26 11:30am (11:20am class) in Library Lab 211

Tuesday May 1 8am (9:40am class) in Library Lab 205