World Responds to the Greeks

This course examines various literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that respond to some of the most recognizable Greek motifs in myth, theater, and politics, with the aim of understanding both what these motifs might be offering specifically to these traditions in particular social-historical contexts and, at the same time, what these traditions in turn bring to our conventional understanding of these motifs, how they reconceptualize them and how they alter them. The overall impetus is framed by a prismatic inquiry of how conditions of modernity, postcoloniality, and globality fashion themselves in engagement with certain persistent imaginaries of antiquity. Texts include various renditions of Antigone in African, Caribbean, Asian or Latin American traditions, poetry by Walcott, Cavafy, and Césaire, essays by Fanon, Soyinka, Senghor, and CL.R. James. This course fulfills the global core requirement. It can be taken with an extra-credit tutorial for students reading materials in Greek.