CLCS 256T Writing and Re-Writing the Classics: Ancient Literature and Its Modern Reception
Legend has it that Goethe began working on a version of the Iphigeneia story, celebrated as the stuff of tragedies by Aeschylus and Euripides, as soon as he had crossed the Alps from Switzerland into Italy: he could not wait to actually set foot on Greece, the homeland of the legend. Since then poets of the neo-classical and romantic eras as well as our own times have been rewriting the plays, poems, epics and proto-novels of ancient Greece to suit contemporary taste and political exigencies. Students will read a series of text pairs, from the ancient Greek and (predominantly) 19th, 20th and 21th century Western traditions in which the same mythical material is worked and reworked, while visiting some of the sites associated with the great works of classical Greek literature.
The aim of this Academic Travel to Greece is three-fold: to map some of the metaphorical and actual geographies of the works we read; to reflect on what might have given rise to the themes, stories and figures celebrated in classical works by authors such as Sappho, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Homer; and to examine how modern-day re-writings in film and literature pick up on tropes and ideas indebted to a vision of Greece as "the cradle of democracy" even while reflecting their own time. This course will also have a creative component in either photography, film or creative writing.