ENGL 351 - Ancient Mythology and Modern Myth
I. Introduction
The Nature and Power of Myth
Joseph Campbell, The Message of the Myth (video)
Myths of Creation
Genesis 1 & 2 (handout)
excerpt from Hesiod, Theogony (handout)
Ovid, pp. 3-5.
Myths of Divine Wrath
Genesis, 3 & 6-9 (handout)
excerpt from David Leeming, The World of Myth (handout)
Ovid, pp.5-16 (through the first twelve lines on 16)
II. The Hero and the Overreacher
Mary Renault, Ovid, pp. 209-19
(Heracles/Hercules), pp. 166-67
(Theseus), pp. 181-90
(Daedalus and Icarus), pp. 26-38
(Phaethon "Hercules Lives" (handout)
review of Hercules, the Disney movie (handout)
"Daedalus and I" (handout)
Ovid, pp. 119-25 (Ceres. Proserpina, and Hades)
handout on the Eleusinian mysteries
Joseph Campbell, "From Darkness to Light: The Mystery Religions of Ancient Greece" (video)
G.S. Kirk, "The Relationship Betwen Myth and Ritual" (handout)
III. Retribution and Atonement
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra
T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
IV. The Rites of Spring: Death and Resurrection
a baseball movie
George Plimpton, "The Curious Case of Sid Finch" (handout)
Murray Ross, "Football Red and Baseball Green"
"'Play Bail'" (handout)
V. Loving and Losing
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Ovid, 234-37 & 259-61 (Orpheus & Eurydice)
Black Orpheus (film)
paper due May 15
FINAL EXAM
REQUIREMENTS & EXPECTATIONS
Regular attendance is expected. Your grade will suffer if you miss more than four classes. Participation in class discussion is strongly encouraged.
The readings listed above will be supplemented by additional handouts, including cartoons and poems. Please save all handouts in a folder of some sort and keep them with your class notebook
In place of a midterm, there will be occasional announced quizzes or brief essay tests on the material.
The paper (approximately a thousand words long) should focus on a modern adaptation of an ancient myth, an adaptation that is not included on this syllabus. I will provide you with a list of possibilities and with further instructions as the term progresses.
In determining your grade for the course, I will give equal weight to 1) the average of the grades for the quizzes/essay tests mentioned above, 2) the grade for the paper, and 3) the final exam grade.
I recommend that you purchase, in addition to the required texts listed below, either Zimmerman's Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Bantam) or Tripp's Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology (New American Library).
I want to call your attention to a two-volume work that is available in the reference section on the second floor of our library: The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s, compiled and edited by Jane Davidson Reid. The call number is REF NX650.M9R45 1993.
TEXTS
Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Penguin)
T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
Eugene O'Neill, Three Plays (Random House)
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Indiana University)
Mary Renault, The King Must Die (Random House)
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