What do the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes, the Roman satirist Juvenal, have in common with rappers Snoop Dogg and Eminem? Many things, in fact, but perhaps most fundamental is their delight in shocking audiences and upending social norms. This course will examine the various arts (including literary, visual and musical media) that transgress the boundaries of taste and convention in ancient Greco-Roman culture and our own era. We will consider, among other topics, why communities feel compelled to repudiate some forms of scandalous art, while turning others - especially those that have come down to us from remote historical periods - into so-called classics.

How do we think 'the world' as such? Globalizing economic paradigms encourage one model that, while it connects distant regions with the ease of a finger-tap, also homogenizes the world, manufacturing patterns of sameness behind simulations of diversity. Our current world-political situation encourages another model, in which fundamental differences are held to warrant the consolidation of borders between Us and Them, "our world" and "theirs." This course begins with the proposal that there are other ways to encounter the world, that are politically compelling, ethically important, and personally enriching--and that the study of literature can help tease out these new paths. Through the idea of World Literature, this course introduces students to the appreciation and critical analysis of literary texts, with the aim of navigating calls for universality or particularity (and perhaps both) in fiction and film. "World literature" here refers not merely to the usual definition of "books written in places other than the US and Europe, "but any form of cultural production that explores and pushes at the limits of a particular world, that steps between and beyond worlds, or that heralds the coming of new worlds still within us, waiting to be born. And though, as we read and discuss our texts, we will glide about in space and time from the inner landscape of a private mind to the reaches of the farthest galaxies, knowledge of languages other than English will not be required, and neither will any prior familiary with the literary humanities. In the company of drunken kings, botanical witches, ambisexual alien lifeforms, and storytellers who've lost their voice, we will reflect on, and collectively navigate, our encounters with the faraway and the familiar--and thus train to think through the challenges of concepts such as translation, narrative, and ideology. Texts include Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. LeGuin, Salman Rushdie, Werner Herzog, Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Hoban, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Arundhathi Roy, and Abbas Kiarostami.

How do we think 'the world' as such? Globalizing economic paradigms encourage one model that, while it connects distant regions with the ease of a finger-tap, also homogenizes the world, manufacturing patterns of sameness behind simulations of diversity. Our current world-political situation encourages another model, in which fundamental differences are held to warrant the consolidation of borders between Us and Them, "our world" and "theirs." This course begins with the proposal that there are other ways to encounter the world, that are politically compelling, ethically important, and personally enriching--and that the study of literature can help tease out these new paths. Through the idea of World Literature, this course introduces students to the appreciation and critical analysis of literary texts, with the aim of navigating calls for universality or particularity (and perhaps both) in fiction and film. "World literature" here refers not merely to the usual definition of "books written in places other than the US and Europe, "but any form of cultural production that explores and pushes at the limits of a particular world, that steps between and beyond worlds, or that heralds the coming of new worlds still within us, waiting to be born. And though, as we read and discuss our texts, we will glide about in space and time from the inner landscape of a private mind to the reaches of the farthest galaxies, knowledge of languages other than English will not be required, and neither will any prior familiary with the literary humanities. In the company of drunken kings, botanical witches, ambisexual alien lifeforms, and storytellers who've lost their voice, we will reflect on, and collectively navigate, our encounters with the faraway and the familiar--and thus train to think through the challenges of concepts such as translation, narrative, and ideology. Texts include Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. LeGuin, Salman Rushdie, Werner Herzog, Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Hoban, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Arundhathi Roy, and Abbas Kiarostami.

All books, even those regarded by some as "classics", are potentially dangerous. This course will survey a selection of ancient books that got their authors in trouble, were censored, inspired rebellion, or enabled social (and antisocial) movements, down to the present moment. Most of the books read will come from ancient Greece or Rome, but some will come from other ancient cultures, such as Egypt, the Near East, and China. Issues involved will include atheism, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, nationalism, magic, and mysticism. The course will make use of brief lectures and presentations but leave as much time as possible for seminar-style discussion.

At its furthest extent during the second century CE, the Roman Empire was truly a "world empire", stretching from northern Britain to North Africa and Egypt, encompassing the whole of Asia Minor, and bordering the Danube in its route from the Black Forest region of Germany to the Black Sea. But in its earliest history it comprised a few small hamlets on a collection of hills adjacent to the Tiber river in central Italy. Over a period of nearly 1500 years, the Roman state transformed from a mythical Kingdom to a Republic dominated by a heterogeneous, competitive aristocracy to an Empire ruled, at least notionally, by one man. It developed complex legal and administrative structures, supported a sophisticated and highly successful military machine, and sustained elaborate systems of economic production and exchange. It was, above all, a society characterized both by a willingness to include newly conquered peoples in the project of empire, and by fundamental, deep-seated practices of social exclusion and domination. This course focuses in particular upon the history of the Roman state between the fifth century BCE and the third century CE, exploring its religious and cultural practices, political, social and economic structures. It also scrutinizes the fundamental tensions and enduring conflicts that characterized this society throughout this 800-year period.

The Greeks enjoy a special place in the construction of western culture and identity, and yet many of us have only the vaguest notion of what their culture was like. A few Greek myths at bedtime when we are kids, maybe a Greek tragedy like Sophokles' Oidipous when we are at school: these are often the only contact we have with the world of the ancient Mediterranean. The story of the Greeks, however, deserves a wider audience, because so much of what we esteem in our own culture derives from them: democracy, epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, history writing, philosophy, aesthetic taste, all of these and many other features of cultural life enter the West from Greece. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi had inscribed over the temple, "Know Thyself." For us, that also means knowing the Greeks. We will cover the period from the Late Bronze Age, c. 1500 BC, down to the time of Alexander the Great, concentrating on the two hundred year interval from 600-400 BC.

The ancient city of Athens, Greece, is renowned as the birthplace of democracy; Sparta is famous for its warlike society; Olympia for the Olympic Games; and Delphi for its famed oracle. But the Greek landscape was dotted with hundreds of other cities, towns, villages, sanctuaries, and hamlets. This seminar is a journey through town and country in ancient Greece, from dense urban spaces to vast forests and agro-pastoral countrysides. We will examine many lines of evidence: (1) ancient texts (e.g., Homeric epics, Hesiod's depiction of rural life, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, the tragedies and comedies of the great playwrights, the geography of Strabo, the travel writing of Pausanias); (2) inscriptions that record details of life and death ; and (3) archaeology (site discovery and excavation, recovery of the material remains of everyday life). These sources will reveal much information about how urban and rural life were organized. A central aim of this seminar is to address this question: is the past a foreign country, or is there nothing new under the sun?

An introduction to the principles and practices of Greek Epigraphy. Study of selected Greek inscriptions.

In this graduate seminar, we will read several Athenian tragedies set in wartime or its immediate aftermath, including Aeschylus’ Persians, Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, Hecuba, and Trojan Women. We will discuss how these plays use or contrast with other Greek representations of military conflict (especially the Iliad), and we will trace the relationship between tragic representations of war and contemporary fifth-century warfare.

Intensive reading in ancient Greek literature, focusing on the skills and practices required to read closely a 150-page “short list” of key texts and becoming familiar with authors, chronology, meters, dialects, and genres. Exercises include analysis, sight translation, and practice versions of the Qualifications Examination in Greek.