Welcome to the Course!

What is “General Humanities I”?  Let’s start with what it isn’t: don’t expect a course where you are expected to memorize endless dates, figures, and factoids to regurgitate on a weekly exam.  Instead, the goal of this class is to explore our shared cultural heritage, a collection of works that continue to shape how we see, appreciate, and evaluate the world.  As the Norton Anthology of World Literature writes in its Preface, “World literature is ground in the history of the world, but it is also the history of imagining this world; it is a history not just of what happened, but also of how humans imagined their place in the midst of history” (xxv).”  In other words, this is a class that explains how we “made” history in our own image. 

The true ‘work’ of this course will be learning to read the literature that survived history to become culture, even though many of them will be unfamiliar to you.  From Greece to India, England to China, we’ll explore the most fundamental ideas of humanity so we can see ourselves in history.  If you are what you eat, you are also what you read—and what your ancestors wrote down to preserve for future generations.  Silly as it might sound, this is your story, preserved in black and white as your cultural DNA.  So start reading!  

BOOKMARK this page since I will post assignments, announcements, links, and other essential information for the course.  I look forward to teaching you this semester and hope you enjoy this vast buffet of cultural delicacies.  Remember that some works will seem difficult and obscure on a first reading; use the daily questions to help you respond to them, and feel free to ask questions in class and through e-mail.  You're not supposed to 'get it' on a first reading, and if everyone understood a work in its entirety, we wouldn't need this class (and I might be out of a job!).  See you in class!