Department of English

This course will examine the relationship between English literature and
that of ancient Greece and Rome.  At times we will discuss how classical theories
of genre and aesthetics were appropriate and reinvented in medieval,
renaissance, and seventeenth-century texts.  What does it mean to call
Hamlet and Oedipus The King tragedies, or The Frogs and The Way Of The World
comedies?  Should we consider the development of English drama and poetry as
an extension of an imposing classical tradition or as a sustained and
resistant response to it?