Charles Altieri (English) and Maura Nolan (English)
(English 180E)

This course focuses on the classical epic as one important record of how cultures become self-conscious about the relation between their ideals and their practices. Because the epic was the most central text in the culture, each succeeding culture had to remake that form; tracing those revisions in terms of authors' revising an entire imagination of the powers of their distinctive culture can be very exciting. The course also addresses how the emotional demands epic texts make on readers change as they revise their predecessors. Moving from the pre-classical Greeks to Romanticism, class readings and discussions included Iliad, the Odyssey, The Aeneid, two books of the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth's Prelude.