GREAT WORKS IN DIALOGUE:TRANFORMATIONS

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 spring quarter of the Great Works sequence will focus on the theme of transformation. We will begin with Ovid's Metamorphoses, a collection of enchanting tales of gods and heroes—their quests, conflicts and mutations—which inspired countless poets and painters throughout the succeeding centuries. Our second work, The Winter's Tale, also concentrates on the theme of mutability, through Shakespeare's vision of the transformative powers of the passions—love, jealousy, revenge, forgiveness—and of the final redemption of death by life. The concluding text of our sequence will be Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, a powerful and haunting treatment of the changes of time, of youth and age, of memory and loss, of art and the natural world, vividly capturing our modern vision.

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.
Ovid, Transformations, trans. Humphries (Indiana U. Press)
Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (Oxford)
Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt)