GREAT WORKS IN DIALOGUE: EPIC JOURNEYS

In this class we continue our two-year sequence of seminars, where students come together to read great texts of philosophy, religion, and literature and to discuss the enduring questions these texts examine. We plan to offer you a long-term engagement with some of the monumental works and thinkers of the past and present. We will encourage you to challenge your own and others' ideas in the light of a rich, thought-provoking text.

Course Description
The winter quarter of the Great Works sequence will focus on the epic tradition, its heroic quests, its broad visions of this world and the next, and its promotion of a culture's highest ideals. We will begin with the earliest Western poet, Homer, and the timeless trials of Odysseus, the archetypal epic hero, as he journeys home to Ithaca and Penelope. We will then continue with Virgil, Homer's great successor, and the creator of a new hero, Aeneas, the personification of Roman republican virtue and the advocate of imperial destiny. We will conclude our survey of epic tradition with Dante's pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in search of personal salvation and the vindication of his own political aspirations for Italy.

Instructors
Cheri Ross
Associate Director, Introduction to the Humanities
Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

Edward Steidle
Lecturer in English

Richard Cushman
Lecturer in English

Renee Courey
Lecturer, Introduction to the Humanities Program

Texts (available At Stanford Bookstore)
The books listed below have been ordered for this course, but any edition of these texts is acceptable.
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Fagels (Penguin)
The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Mandelbaum (Bantam)
Dante, Inferno, trans. Durling (Oxford)
Dante, Purgatorio and Paradiso, trans. Mandelbaum (Bantam)