Welcome to General Humanities I, subtitled "Love, Death, and Revenge". This
is a discussion and reading-based class that asks the question, “who were the
first people to write/think the way we do today?” If the “humanities” is the
study of what makes us human, then literature is study of how we learned to
express this humanity in writing (and performance). By reading widely throughout
many cultures and eras, we’ll slowly uncover how little separates the past and
the present, and how history is never past—it’s still alive in the room.
From love poems to ghost stories to vicious power struggles, this class has a
little bit of everything. And while most of it will initially sound strange or
old, by the end, I hope that much of it will feel familiar—and change how you
look at the 21st century. Be prepared to read a lot, write a lot,
and listen and learn from your classmates, since the study of the humanities is
constantly being re-written with each new generation of readers/thinkers.
Required Texts (all available at the ECU bookstore): Sappho, Stung With Love: Poems and
Fragments; Aristophanes, Lysistrata and Other Plays; Hearn, Kwaidan;
Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North; Machiavelli, The Prince;
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Please let me know if you have any questions. You can find me in my office, HM 348, or via email at jgrasso@ecok.edu .
More posts to follow!
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