CLASSIC Course Descriptions for 2019-2020

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Winter Course Descriptions

Course	Title	Instructor	Description
CLASSIC 37B	ROMAN EMPIRE	ZISSOS, P.	A survey of Roman civilization from Augustus’s consolidation of power following the civil wars of the first century BCE to the crisis of the third century CE. Includes social history, literature, art, architecture, and religion.
CLASSIC 45B	THE HEROES	KARANIKA, A.	An overview of the main myths of the heroes of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their influence in contemporary and later literature and art. Includes readings from both ancient and modern sources.
CLASSIC 99	SPEC STDS:CLASSICS	STAFF
CLASSIC 160W	HOMERIC EPIC	SNYDER, R.	Since antiquity, epic has been considered the highest genre, the one suited to stories that define the achievements and aspirations of an entire people. The major epic works, moreover, have exerted a powerful influence on literature throughout the world. Our goal in this class will be to bridge the “absolute epic distance” that Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed distinguished the genre and conduct an intensive study of the best-known Greek epics. Close readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey will be supplemented by critical texts that examine the tremendous social and civic import of epic in antiquity and the broader cultural contexts in which the genre flourished. The significance of the epic singer, the distinction between oral and written compositional techniques, and notions of gender, class, and power in the ancient world will be topics of investigation that inform our reading of the epic texts.
CLASSIC 170	PERSIAN EMPIRE	CANEPA, M.	Art, archaeology of ancient Persia and the wider Iranian world from the rise of the Achaemenid empire in 550 BCE to the coming of Alexander in 330 BCE. The course will examine the creation of a Persian imperial art and architecture under Cyrus the Great and its revision and expansion under Darius I and his successors. In addition, we will study the mutual influences of Persian visual culture and those of their provinces and subject peoples, including Egypt, the Greek World, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and India. Topics include the development of the Persian palace, paradise gardens, urbanism, court culture, religion, seals and archives. We will consider sites of major dynastic importance and their development (e.g. Persepolis, Susa, Babylon); 'institutions' (e.g. palace, paradise, city, sacred spaces); media (rock reliefs/inscriptions, painting, coinage, seals and sealings etc.). The lecture will put the ancient material into dialog with select theoretical readings on such themes as power, time, memory, the body, although the focus will be on the ancient material/problems. ART HISTORY 100 / PERSIAN 150
CLASSIC 176	MODERNITY'S RUINS	CHIAMPI, J.	(same as 22764 Com Lit 123, Lec A; 24032 Euro St 101A, Lec A; and 24929 French 150, Lec A) In the 16th-century, the city of Rome and its ancient ruins weren’t just a tourist attraction, they embodied the artistic, philosophical and even political ambitions of the modern age. The paradoxical nature of ruins in particular, as figures of both a survival of the past and its irremediable loss in a disinherited present, informed an imaginary that will haunt modern literature, art and thought. The experience of a fragmented world, from the early modern anatomies of the microcosm that is man to the wastelands of postmodernity, defined a new experience of the past and the present which the Renaissance explored in its creations. Far from being just the source of an ideal to be imitated, Antiquity was thereby rediscovered as a powerful resource to reimagine the world in its forms and meanings. This course – taught in English – will look at important literary and artistic inventions of the modern world which the French Renaissance, rivaling both the authority of the Ancients and the prestige of its Italian precursor, will exemplify in its attempt to become the new Rome, the cultural and political capital of modernity.
CLASSIC 192A	SENIOR CAPSTONE	KARANIKA, A.
CLASSIC 192A	SENIOR CAPSTONE	SNYDER, R.
CLASSIC 192A	SENIOR CAPSTONE	ZISSOS, P.
CLASSIC 192A	SENIOR CAPSTONE	GIANNOPOULOU, Z.
CLASSIC 192A	SENIOR CAPSTONE	PANTELIA, M.
CLASSIC 198	DIRECTED GROUP STDY	STAFF
CLASSIC 280	INDEPENDENT STUDY	SNYDER, R.
CLASSIC 280	INDEPENDENT STUDY	KARANIKA, A.
CLASSIC 280	INDEPENDENT STUDY	PANTELIA, M.
CLASSIC 280	INDEPENDENT STUDY	ZISSOS, P.
CLASSIC 280	INDEPENDENT STUDY	GIANNOPOULOU, Z.