WHAT IS THIS COURSE ABOUT?

This course begins with the Ancient Greeks and ends with modern writers and the story of a Greek immigrant to Colorado. We are involved in history and literature in this pursuit. Here are some ideas and questions for you to consider:

As you will quickly see this block,  Ancient Greek literature is full of questions of identity.

• Who are the Greeks?
• When do they stop being a collection of disparate tribes, if ever, and become a nation?
• Who are the Trojans?
• How is nationality defined?
• What role does Mediterranean geography play in this?
• What is a state?
• What makes a ruler or ruling system good or bad?
• How does awareness of other peoples tell us who we are?
• Is it language or geography that defines a nation? Politics? Something else?
• How do the Greeks perceive gender roles?
• What role does religion play in national and individual identity? What changes do you see in the transitions from Pagan to Christian societies to the more secular state after the 1981 election?
• What about diaspora? Greeks have played influential roles all over the globe, and their literature is full of exile, deracination, grief at the loss of home (nostalgia). How do you see these issues playing into ideas of “Greekness”?

When we look at the emergence of a modern Greek state in Block 2, these same questions will be important. Here are a few of the historical matters with which you should become familiar:

• The Byzantine and Ottoman Empires
• Greek War of Independence
• Successive wars and rebellions through 1922 enlarging Greek borders
• Struggle between royalists, democratic forces and fascists (is Greece’s struggle like that

               of many modern nations?)

• The Italian and German invasions of WW II, years of occupation and the devastating

               Civil War that followed

• Greece’s post-war political and social troubles
• The Junta of 1967-74
• The Turkish invasion of Cyprus
• The Karamanlis government following the Junta
• The election of PASOK in 1981 and Greece’s entry into “Europe”

Given these questions and events, what characterizes Ancient, Medieval and Modern Greek literatures? How do modern writers respond to the fact that their literary tradition is an unbroken line going back three thousand years? What are the political, spiritual, sexual and social forces they grapple with? What is universal about this, what is culturally determined?