GRST 321 - Advanced Greek: Topics in Greek Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as GRST 226) Topic for 2018/19b: Thinking & Madness: Is the Wise Man a Madman? This course explores the connection between thinking and madness, and sanity and insanity, through a careful reading of such puzzles as the crazed sobriety of Pentheus and the sober mania of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae, the impossibility of articulating “non-being” in Parmenides’ Fragments, and the kinship between the wise man and the madman in Plato’s Euthydemus, in which the hyperbolic logic-chopping of two ridiculous sophists exterminates the very possibility of speech. The importance of grammatical and syntactical ambiguities in the Greek language (e.g., doubleentendre, the middle voice, and negations), the mad music of metrical verse, and the strangeness of communicating philosophy in poetry, is critical to our study. Gwen Grewal.

This course should be elected by students before electing any advanced Greek course in the department.

Students enrolled in GRST 226 have an extra hour of grammar review and students enrolled in GRST 321 have longer Greek assignments.

Two 75-minute periods.