Department of English

The course is open to all students, but preference will be given to general honors students and to Classics and English majors.

The influence of the Roman poet Ovid on subsequent art and literature was considerable. This course, designed principally for students of art and literature, surveys the Ovidian tradition from antiquity to the present. To be considered are Ovid himself, Apuleius, medieval "moralizers" of Ovid's tales, several writers of the English Renaissance (especially Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton), Italian Renaissance poets, composers, and painters, book illustrators from the sixteenth century through Picasso, French film maker Jean Cocteau, and contemporary playwright Mary Zimmerman. The course offers students a chance to survey the extent of the "classical tradition" and to contemplate Ovid through the eyes of centuries of readers.