Course Description
This course examines Western Civilization's earliest and most beautiful attempts to understand itself through written language. We will reach back at least 4,000 years to find our ancestors struggling with the same questions each of us must answer: Who am I? What is love? What is God? Why do we suffer? What is happiness and how can I find it? How can I build a moral and just society? What becomes of us when we die? Will a buried Twinkie really last 1,000 years?
We will try to see our history and the seeds of our own culture not as a series of events but as an experience lived by individuals who loved, hated, yearned, grieved and often sinned with all the passionate intensity each of us brings to our own lives.
We might subtitle this course “suffering and love”, or “love and death”, or, simply, “life”, because when we refer to “the literature of Western Civilization,” we’re really referring to the chronicle of what it means to be alive, to feel the human experience.
At times we'll find the seeds of our civilization planted so deeply, in such exotic soil, that we often cannot even recognize the place as earth, but overall this chronicle will likely remind us that the human experience is essentially always the same, no matter where it takes place: no matter the time or place, we all must find our place in an uncertain world, confront the monsters and demons of our times, ask what mysteries the heavens hold, weep and shake with terror in the face of death, and risk everything for love.
The characters we will meet are you and me, our parents, siblings and friends: they destroy themselves with blinding lust, greed, pride; brothers, best friends and lovers betray each other over fear and jealousy; valiant soldiers conquer their fear and die too young in distant lands.
Basically, our task is to better understand the worldviews that created these texts, better understand the world the texts created and, most importantly, better understand our own worldviews in relationship to the events, texts and authors who created them, and in that process, created us.
Origin And Influence
Our goal in this course is to understand texts from two points of view:
origin and influence.
Origin: We want to understand the cultural dynamics and historical processes and influences
that produced these texts; what did these people believe and what made them
believe it?
Influence: how did these texts go on to influence history and culture and, most importantly, our own values and beliefs?
My job as your teacher is not to teach you what “truth” is – I have no idea what it is – but to help you understand what others have thought it was or is, why they thought so, and how those ideas have been translated into literature and transmitted through the ages. In other words, “wisdom” in this class is measured in terms of what you understand about the nature of a belief, rather than whether or not you believe it. Or, put another way, what we’re after in here is empathy, not sympathy; you are not expected to agree or disagree with anything we read in here, but you are expected to understand it and understand how it influenced your own or your culture's current beliefs. In other words, you should leave this class with a better understanding of how we came to be who we are now.
In terms of religion and wisdom and truth, my own, personal, agenda is to light or feed a fire under all of y'all in hopes that you’ll get up and look around and think and read more. I also hope that you’ll find, as I have, that some of the most interesting and rewarding friendships and experiences you can have are with people who see the world in ways you never imagined – and possibly find insane or repugnant. This goes as much for the people in your group as it does for your relationship to the authors and characters that we’ll read, as well as to with me and my ideas.
In short, we all share one simple goal in here: to learn as much as possible from as many sources as possible, not only from the texts and their histories, but from everyone in this class.