ENG 136 - Classic Greek Literature and Film

Semester Hours: 4

Think the guests on Jerry Springer’s show are weird? Wait until you get a load of the characters in ancient Greek literature! In this course, we’ll study several Greek tragedies, a comedy or two, and some poetry (in modern translations). In these texts, we’ll meet “upstanding” literary figures like Oedipus, who married his mother (without knowing it, of course) and killed his father; Clytemnestra, who murdered her husband Agamemnon after he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia so that he could fight the Trojan War; Orestes, their son, who killed Clytemnestra and her lover to avenge his father’s murder; Medea, who chopped up her brother and later killed her children to get back at her unfaithful husband; and Lysistrata, who led the Athenian women to revolt against the men by denying them … . You’ll have to finish the course to discover just what she denied them!

Cross-Listed: FS 136
Intellectual Perspective: HC