NCSSM COURSE CAtAlOG - North Carolina School of Science and ...

EN362 Classical Myth: Epic and Tragedy
One trimester
Credit: One unit core elective credit.
Meeting pattern: Three periods per week including lab.
Athena. Zeus. The abduction of Persephone. The fall of Troy. The wanderings
and homecoming of Odysseus. For more than two thousand years, these stories
of gods and mortals have gripped the imaginations of Western readers. In this
course, we explore major myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans, with a
special emphasis on how these oral tales were committed to writing in epic
poems and tragic plays. Throughout the course, we seek to understand these
myths in the geographical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were
created. We read ancient Greek and Roman texts in English translation,
including works by Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Vergil, and
Ovid. Ancient works of art and architecture, including vase paintings and
sculpture, form a rich complement to these texts. We also explore major
theories of myth interpretation — from approaches taken by the ancient Greeks
themselves to those developed by modern-day theorists — and apply these
theories to the myths we encounter in the course. Finally, we explore how later
artists, writers, and filmmakers have appropriated, interpreted, and transformed
these ancient stories into new forms — often for very different purposes than
those served by the myths in the ancient world.
EN402 British Literature to 1603
One trimester
Credit: One unit core English credit.
Prerequisite: Completion of three trimesters of AS303 Writing and American
Studies or AS305 American Studies or completion of two trimesters of AS303 or
AS305 and permission of the Dean of Humanities.
Meeting pattern: Three periods per week including lab.
In this course we examine the Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English origins of the
English literary tradition and the richness of the English Renaissance. We
encounter poems like “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” which blend
Christian and pagan elements, and the epic story of Beowulf — one of the first
great epics in the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages. In fourteenthcentury
poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we join a medieval knight
on his quest for a mysterious green man, and in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales we
go on an epic pilgrimage — one that has both spiritual and geographic
dimensions — in the company of a group of pilgrims who are on their way to
Canterbury. The end of the course deals with the flowering of English literature
and the evolution of drama from plays like Everyman to transgressive heroes
such as Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, or Shakespeare’s Macbeth and
Hamlet. Grades are based on a variety of essays and tests.
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