A9. The Iliad (10-Week Course, A9 & B10)

Among the great treasures of Western European Literature, there are none greater, none more beautiful, and none that have had a greater impact on subsequent literary traditions than the Homeric epics.  This course will focus on The Iliad, a poem surviving from a world where technology was primitive but the human passions precipitating disaster were pretty much the same as they are today. The poem of the Trojan War describes a crisis of culture which is endemic in human society. In short, The Iliad remains as miraculously relevant in the electronic age as it was in the Bronze Age. 

Lillian Corti earned a doctorate in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York (1984). She taught ancient classics in translation at Tulsa University, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and at the Athens Center for the North West Council of Study Abroad (2004). She participated in an NIH Institute on Homer and Oral Traditions at the University of Arizona in Tucson (1994) and has published a book-length study of the myth of Medea.Required book:  The Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. University of Chicago Press.  ISBN: 978-0226469409.

Reading for first class:  Introduction and Book 1 of The Iliad