GRK 390 The Hero vs. Death and God (The Early Years)
This course will examine the peculiar aspirations and struggles of the ancient hero--in all the troubled and troubling glamour of their eventful, and often tragically short, lives. We shall begin the course with the four thousand year old story of Gilgamesh, the magnificent yet tormented hero-king of the Ancient Near East; we shall then attempt to interpret anew the meaning of three of the most famous Greek and Roman epic heroes (Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas); and finally, we shall conclude the class with an examination of the heroes of the Mahabharata, the great religious epic of ancient India. Too energetic, too angry and far too proud to shrink back from a challenge, these difficult figures made a habit of exposing themselves not only to the mortal dangers of advancing enemy hordes, but, more meaningfully, to all those maddening contradictions our human existence seems to entail for us: the "higher" powers that even against our wills determine us, the sad mortality that against all our longing ends us. Scorning the safety of the familiar and the everyday, the heroes of ancient epic pushed themselves relentlessly to act and to think to the very limit of things. Availing ourselves of any number of modern philosophic theories (deconstruction, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism and the like), we shall endeavor in this class to think that exasperating limit in intimate company with them.
This course will be offered in conjunction with CSLC 190, but will meet for an additional 90 minutes per week to read the Homeric texts covered in class in their original Greek form.
Students completing the final paper in this course with a grade of C or higher can use this work to satisfy the Second Stage Writing requirement.
Core Requirements Met
- Pre-1800
- Global Connections