12-150  Special Topic  :  Religion and Literature

Brother Anthony (안선재)

Fall Semester 2007, Wednesday, Friday  3:00pm

This course will survey the representation of religious themes in a variety of poetic forms, ancient and more recent, European and Asian

Weekly topics

(August 29, 31)  Week 1  The poetry of origins: Hesiod’s Theogony; Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Bible: Genesis, Psalms, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes
(Sept 5, 7)  Week 2  Old Testament story-telling: Genesis, Noah, Joseph, Job
(Sept 12, 14)  Week 3  The Greek gods as they are depicted by Homer
(Sept 19, 21)  Week 4  Sophocles: Oedipus
(No class Sept 26. Sept 28)  Week 5  Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound
(No class Oct 3. Oct 5)  Week 6  Hesiod: The story of Pandora
(Oct 10, 12)  Week 7  Fortune in Boethius and the notion of  tragedy
(Oct 17, 19)  Week 8  Dante
(Oct 24, 26)  Week 9  Exams
(Oct 31, Nov 2)  Week 10  John Donne, George Herbert
(Nov 7, 9)  Week 11  John  Milton: Paradise Lost
(Nov 14, 16)  Week 12  Gerard Manley Hopkins
(Nov 21, 23)  Week 13  T. S. Eliot
(Nov 28, 30)  Week 14  R. S. Thomas,  Geoffrey Hill,  Philip Larkin
(Dec 5, 7)  Week 15  (Research project) Buddhist poetry in Korea / China / Japan
(Dec 12,14) Week 16  Exams

Texts

A selection of texts will be prepared and photocopied

Assignments

The mid-term assignment will be to write a comparison of the representations of the gods in the Greek works and the God of Old Testament.

The final assignment will be a comparison of three of the British writers studied, one from the 17th century, two from the 19th - 20th centuries.

There will be a midterm and a final examination on the topics and texts studied in class