GRST 302 - The Blegen Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The course is offered by the Blegen Distinguished Visiting Research Professor or the Blegen Research Fellow in Classics, appointed annually to pursue research and lecture on his/her scholarly concerns in classical antiquity. We encourage students to take note of the fact that each Blegen Seminar is uniquely offered and will not be repeated. Since the topic changes every year, the course may be taken for credit more than once.

Topic for 2015/16b: The History of the Self. It is commonly supposed that the “self” itself did not exist until modernity, but how can this be true? Examining texts from Sappho to St. Paul, in this course we attempt not only to understand this question, but also to answer it. Using texts that focus on the question of the definition of the “I,” “self,” “soul,” or the “subject” of subjectivity, we explore a variety of historical moments in the effort get a better understanding of ancient and modern, then and now, from the small social circles of pre-literate Greece to the Society of the Spectacle in Imperial Rome, from the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome to the scientific revolution, and up to the atrocities of the twentieth century. While introducing students to foundational moments of ancient literature and philosophy, from Plato’s introduction of the injunction “Know thyself” and the discovery of the autobiographical “I” or Ego in the poetry of Sappho, to the letters of high imperial Roman letters of the philosopher Seneca to the Confessions of St. Augustine written during the fall of Rome, we will also consult modern texts by Descartes, Whitman, Anouilh, de Beauvoir, and Foucault in order to understand what we mean when we talk about our selves and how conceptions of the self have changed from antiquity to modernity. Mr. Dressler.

Open to all classes.

Two 75-minute periods.