CLA 376 BEAUTY STAND STILL HERE

An investigation of beauty and time in the classical literary tradition. Students read authors who share an intuition that beauty, even transient beauty, is somehow immortal - and who express this intuition through narratives of longing and desire. Supplementary readings provide background on ancient conceptions of time and of the erotic. Primary readings focus on Plato's Symposium and Saint Augustine's Confessions. Excerpts from works such as Montaigne's Essays, Goethe's Faust, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse highlight key moments in the evolution of these Greco-Roman ideas through later European literature.