OWU Online | Humanities-Classics | HMCL Courses 100-230

HMCL Courses 100 - 230

HMCL 122 Myth, Legend, and Folklore (Staff) Traditional cultures (indeed, all cultures) have stories, images, foods, clothes, sayings, music, dance, etiquettes, and other folkways that define them to themselves and to others. This introduction to folklore surveys gods, humans, animals, and even plants in the world of the Greeks and Romans, and other cultures, sometimes including Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Slavic, Scandinavian, African, African American, and American Indian. Topics include epic and comic heroes and monsters, tricksters and fools, creation, extinction (millennialism), and social hierarchies (by gender, class, race, etc.). Myth theory (for example, archetypes, psychoanalysis, and functionalism) may be included in particular sections.

HMCL 122 Myth, Legend & Folklore:
Classical Mythology (Fratantuono)
A study of the classical hero (and heroine) in Greek and Roman mythology. Beginning with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, we move on to three masterpieces of Greek tragedy: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Ajax, and Euripides’ Trojan Women. The course concludes with a detailed study of Virgil’s Aeneid. Occasional text substitution or addition based on class interest, e.g., Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Euripides’ Hecuba, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This class offers a comprehensive introduction to the classics, a fine gateway to the major in classics, and wonderful opportunity for anyone interested in the ancient Greeks and Romans to learn more about the timeless tales that constitute the very foundations of western civilization.

HMCL 122 Myth, Legend & Folklore:
European & Arabian Tales 12c-17c (Lovell)
In this course, we shall study post-classical, mainly European tales in English translation whose origins comprise rich folkloric traditions. Manifestations of the “story” form, major topics such as love, justice, conflict and the supernatural, as well as a range of interpretative approaches will be considered. Do stories have a moral? How do stories originate? Are they the result of an individual mind, a collective tradition, or both? How are they situated with respect to elite and popular culture? Primary readings will include selections from Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, The Poem of the Cid, Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Molière and the Arabian Nights.

HMCL 124 Love and Sexuality in Literature and the Arts (Staff)
An introduction to development and influences of divine, Platonic and ancient Indian, and sexual love in music, literature, and the visual arts from ancient Asian, Indian, Hebrew and Greek civilizations to the 20th Century. The works and artists considered may include Song of Solomon, Hesiod, Sappho, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, The Kama Sutra, Plato’s Symposium, Catullus, Boccaccio’s Decameron, The Tale of Genji, Shakespeare, Freud, Lawrence, Michelangelo, Monet, Picasso, Foucault, Marguerite Duras and others.

HMCL 127 Myth, Legend, and Folklore (Sokolsky) Why do we read myths, legends, and folklore? Can you recall the lessons about life that you were supposed to cull from these stories? What about the tales that come from non-Western countries such as Japan, Korea, China, Morocco, and India? Are the underlying premises of myths, legends, and folklore of Asian and Arabic cultures the same as those of Western cultures? In this class, through assigned literary readings, we will travel to Japan, China, Korea, Morocco, Bali, India, and other places to see how people of these countries are shaped through they myths, legends, and folklore of their respective cultures. The goal of the class will be to see if there is a universal theme to all of these texts. Thus are we as human beings ultimately the same? Or are there cultural differences in the way people from different countries perceive the world? How do ideas of gender, class, and race get subtly transmitted in these tales? Moreover, we will look at how such stories get transmitted (oral versus written tradition). By studying the myths, legends, and folklore of other cultures, we
will have a better understanding of how the worldviews of people who live in distant lands, as well as our own worldview, are shaped by supposted entertainment tales. Some of the readings and assignments will include: the Pansori of Korea, the storyboards of Palau, the puppet theatre of Bali, the Buddhist tales of Japan, China, and Korea, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and the famous Indian legend, The Ramayana.

HMCL 200.3 Epic and Anti-Epic (Lateiner)
Heroic epic traditions spawned imitations and counter-traditions. What does epic do for and to western societies, their classes, ages, and genders. Epic has distinctive approaches to time and space, life and the after-life, supernaturals, and humans. We examine the fluid boundaries of this nation-shaping genre. Texts include Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, then Classical Greek Homer, Hellenistic Apollonios of Rhodes, the Roman revolutionaries Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid, and Anglo-Saxon Beowulf.

HMCL 200.6 Modern Arabic Literature (Staff)
This course surveys the development of modern Arabic literature and the influence of Western literary genres. Poetic and prose selections, in English translation, will be read, examined and related to the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic contexts in which they were created. Themes such as the conflict between tradition and modernity, change of gender roles, alienation, orientalism/anti-colonialism, religion and politics, poverty and literacy, and construction of individual and national identity are treated. There will be a special focus on Arab women novelists and the construction of gendered relations: Arab women and feminism, patriarchy, civil war, sexuality, religion, and the West. The course attempts to provide the student with (1) an appreciation for the literary and intellectual challenge posed by Arabic in the panorama of world literature and (2) a critical insight into the major developments of the 20th century Arabic literature and its transitional cultural dilemmas and transformation.

HMCL 200.8 Classical Arabic Literature in Translation (Staff)
The course is a historical survey of classical Arabic poetry and prose genres, their styles and literary conventions that developed between the 5th and 16th centuries. It examines texts in English translation with reference to the ways poetry and prose were recited and written down, sources of literary inspiration for various genres, and canons of traditional Arabic literary criticism.

Among the topics to be treated are heroic odes, Qur’anic, philosophical, aesthetic, and mystical narratives, fables, epistles, erotic tales, love lyrics, drama, and folkloric romances such as the Thousand and One Nights. Class discussion, based upon the readings and the questions and issues posed by the students, will be conducted and background lectures to provide historical and cultural contexts will be given.

HMCL 222 Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome (Fratantuono, Lateiner)
The visible past, the material remains of vanished Mediterranean civilizations, excite the student and the tourist. The Greek polis and the Roman urbs organized labor, concentrated civic energies, and led to barely believable human monuments on the European, Near Eastern, and North African landscapes. Dwelling among such structures, grand and mean, decisively influenced the course of Western civilization. The history of archaeology, the classical landscape and cityscape, pots and temples, athletics and spectacles of violence, and trade and slavery provide some of the topics to be interpreted by stones, sherds, coins, and testimonia.

HMCL 226 Gender and Identity (Sokolsky)
What do words such as "male," "female," "man," and "woman" mean? How do they affect our sense of ourselves? Judith Butler, a famous feminist, argues that "man" and "woman" are not just nouns, but also verbs, implying a performance of gender. There is also now an increased awareness of transgender, thus complicating the binary of male versus female. We will look at literature, film, and other art forms to see how concepts of gender have changed over time and place. Possible texts include Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street, Mishima Yukio's Forbidden Colors, Fatima Mernissi's Beyond the Veil, and the Japanese pre-modern classic of gender bending, The Changelings.

HMCL 227 Rites of Passage (Kent)
A study of the human life span with emphasis on the ways major authors from different nations treat the transitions from stage to stage: infancy, childhood, adolescence, a adulthood, old age. The primary goal of the course is to enable students, through study of selected novels, essays, dramas, short stories, and poetry, to deepen their understanding of human development and to sharpen their perceptions of their own lives – past, present, and future. In short, to help them “see life steadily and see it whole.” Readings will include Erikson’s Childhood and Society; Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus; Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; Montaigne’s Essays; Schwarzbart’s Bridge of Beyond, and Roy’s The God of Small Things. Honors Course, Diversity Course.