World Masterpieces

Fall 2009

090:238:section  02
TuTh 1100-1220
Penn 401 

• Cultural literacy
• Critical reading
• Argumentative writing

• a knowledge of the essential outlines of the plots, the major characters, the important settings, and some of the most obvious themes of our selected series of Western literary classics;

• a sense of the ways in which the Western cultural tradition is both continious and discontinuous (e.g. despite the obvious discontinuity between classical pagan culture and medieval Christian culture, Dante is still working in the Virgilian tradition);

• a knowledge of the periods into which the Western cultural tradition is usually defined (classical – medieval – modern) and of the usefulness but also the limitations of such a periodization;

• a knowledge of the genres in which the works under study are written, above all the three Aristotelian genres (epic, drama, lyric), but also “epic” in a narrower sense, and perhaps some other smaller categories;

• a knowledge of important trends and phenomena in literature (and to some extent in other arts) from Homer through Milton (I mean, here, things like the importance of intertextuality in epic, the idea of the epic simile, the nature of medieval allegory, “courtly love” and why much medieval love poetry has nothing to do with it, and so forth);

• a knowledge of some of the most important “big ideas,” cultural phenomena, world views, etc., embodied in the works under study (such as views of the relationship between men and God/gods, notions of fate, ideas about ethics and justice, etc.; changing views of gender, love, marriage);

• an understanding of how literary works convey meaning, and how their modes of meaning have changed during the period under study (for example, metaphor, allegory; changing roles of the epic narrator).