Major / Minor Requirement

HUMANITIES-CLASSICS offers students a unique opportunity to pursue courses in western and nonwestern comparative literatures and cultures, often combined with a study of visual and other arts. The department offers an array of courses with varied focus: for example, thematic courses (folk heroes, love, gender, rites of passage), genre courses (tragedy, comedy), and period courses (Ancient Rome, Medieval, Modern, and Post-Modern) in the traditional Great Books and in other creative masterpieces (architecture, art, and music). The Hellenic, Roman, Hebraic, and Italian Renaissance traditions are fundamental to this study of Western civilization. The lasting achievements of Homer, Sappho, Cicero, the Bible, and later writers such as Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kafka, Calvino, and Cixous continue to provoke, stimulate, and challenge contemporary thought.

In the non-Western tradition, Humanities-Classics embraces the extraordinary wealth of ancient and recent texts from India, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the Asia that have become essential for an educated citizenry in the world today. Courses are therefore structured to encourage students to compare the values and artistic strategies of different traditions, and to observe different formulations of enduring questions regarding freedom and constraint, love and sexuality, self-knowledge and duty. Works from India (Arundhati Roy), from Africa (Achebe), from Latin America (Borges), and Asia (Murasaki Shikibu, Lu Xun, Matsuo Basho, Choi In-Hoon) extend our knowledge of world literature. We offer comparative literature courses in which topics, perspectives, and problems in various ethnic and literary traditions widen the field of vision. Many of these courses question traditional canons and hierarchies constructed both long ago and in recent decades.

Humanities-Classics also offers instruction in Greek and Latin languages and literatures at all levels, from elementary to advanced. Within the first two years, the student may read the epics of Homer, the tragic lyrics of Euripides, the dialogues of Plato, the works of Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid, etc., in the original languages. The study of Greek or Latin provides a basis for independent insights into ancient Mediterranean languages and societies, which are significant sources of current American concepts in social and political thought.

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