The Western Epic Tradition (offered every first semester)
Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Roman and Indic expression. Emphasis on Homer, Apollonius and Vergil, with reports on Gilgamesh, Ramses II, Hesiod, Alexandria, biblical archaeology, Roman history, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, Vyasa and Valmiki
Genre Studies: European Literary Modes (offered every second semester)
The allegorical, the sacred, the ironic, the universal and the absurd, according to Ovid, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe and Dostoevskii. Classical, medieval, Renaissance, Romantic and modern ways of thinking. Selections from the longer works, with reports on many topics
Renaissance Literature (offered every other second semester)
Italian, French and English masterworks of the sixteenth century. Emphasis on Castiglione, Rabelais and Sidney, with reports on Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, the Italian romance; quattrocento and cinquecento art; popular culture, humanism, neoplatonism
Studies in Spenser (offered every other first semester)
Classical, biblical and continental Renaissance backgrounds; the sixteenth-century English context; a survey of the minor poems; emphasis on The Faerie Queene. This research seminar requires reports only on progress toward the final paper
Studies in Milton (offered every other first semester)
Classical, biblical and continental Renaissance backgrounds; the seventeenth-century English contest; a survey of the minor poems; emphasis on the major poems. This research seminar requires reports only on progress toward the final paper.
Victorian Literature (offered every other second semester)
History, philosophy and autobiography; politics, culture and the decadence; the literature of experience; the dandy; topics that inform our discussions of Carlyle, Mill and Newman; Ruskin, Arnold and Pater; the novelists; Tennyson and Browning; Wilde