BA Ancient History / Course details

Year of entry: 2024

Course unit details:
Otherworlds: Distance and Difference in Ancient Greek Literature

Course unit fact file
Unit code CAHE30232
Credit rating 20
Unit level Level 3
Teaching period(s) Semester 2
Available as a free choice unit? Yes

Overview

This unit enables students to develop an enhanced understanding of how Greek writers, mainly historians, represented non-Greek peoples and those, such as shepherds, who lived on the margins of the urban world. Students will read texts from the classical period to the Second Sophistic, authors, and genres. They will encounter a range of literary techniques employed to explore the customs, habits, and political organization of numerous peoples, both Greeks and non-Greeks. A focus on close reading will enable detailed scrutiny of the linguistic means by which the texts fashion meaning and articulate points of view. 

Pre/co-requisites

Co-requisite - CAHE30121 Advanced Greek 2 (higher is fine) 

Aims

The unit aims to:

1. To introduce students to the varieties of style, language and narrative structure in ancient Greek ethnographic and historiographical writing.

2. To enable students to develop a sense of the effects created by ethnographic writing.

3. To enable students to carry out close and comparative reading of original texts, developing technical skills acquired in earlier Greek Language course units. 

Teaching and learning methods

The weekly lectures will explore important themes and intellectual issues in the texts under discussion, as well as introducing important scholarly debates.

The first seminar each week will be devoted to close reading of the passages of Greek texts for the week, including issues of vocabulary, diction, syntax, scansion (where relevant).

The second seminar will concentrate on wider discussion of the passages for the week, including intertextuality, rhetoric, and social and intellectual context.

Students will be given specific tasks to prepare for each seminar, including passages to be translated and analysed, as well as wider questions to be addressed.

Discussion of secondary literature will be related to the primary aim of improving students’ ability to read the texts closely.

Knowledge and understanding

  • Have developed further their knowledge of Ancient Greek grammar, syntax, and rhetorical techniques
  • Connect and compare different treatments of ethnic, religious, cultural, and economic identities in different periods
  • Connect and compare treatment of ethnic and economic groups across literary genres
     

Intellectual skills

  • Have increased ability to read and translate Ancient Greek
  • Develop critical reflection on the literary qualities of texts and the scholarly debates surrounding them
  • Be able to support a range of views about debated literary interpretations with reasoned arguments
  • Developed a more developed understanding of how technical aspects learned in Advanced Language courses can enhance interpretation
     

Practical skills

  • Have increased ability to use library, electronic and online resources to enhance the study of Ancient Greek texts
  • Engage with other members of the class in order to develop literary reading as a communal activity

Transferable skills and personal qualities

  • Attention to detail

Assessment methods

Interpretative commentary - 25%

Lemmatic commentary - 25%

Online exam - 50%

Feedback methods

Commentary - written feedback within three weeks

Online exam - written feedback as for other exams

Recommended reading

F. Harzog, The Mirror of Herodotus (Berkeley CA, 1988)

P. Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander (Berkeley CA, 2001)

R. Stoneman, The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander the Great to the Indo-Greeks (Princeton, 2018) 

Study hours

Scheduled activity hours
Lectures 11
Seminars 22
Independent study hours
Independent study 167

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