Module CLAS3291: WOMEN IN ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

Department: CLASSICS AND ANCIENT HISTORY

CLAS3291: WOMEN IN ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

Prerequisites

• None.

Corequisites

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• To introduce students who have acquired through the first two years of their course a good range of knowledge and depth of understanding of Greek literature and society to the ways in which women, sexuality, and gender differentials were portrayed and discussed in these contexts.
• to pull together, thereby, many threads of earlier learning in a demanding theoretical framework.

Content

• This module explores the possibility of reconstructing the authentic experiences of women in the Greek world.
• It examines the representation and stereotyping of women in literature and the visual arts, and sets this against evidence for the social and economic status of women within the city-state, drawing on evidence from historiographical, medical, and forensic texts.
• The module also examines the more influential theoretical perspectives from which modern scholars have viewed ancient images of women.

Learning Outcomes

• Students who successfully complete the course will be acquainted with the central texts, issues and controversies in the field of gender in archaic and classical Greek antiquity, with the addition of three Hellenistic authors (Nossis, Herodas, Theocritus), and also with the history of 'women's studies' in the Classics academy since 1968.

• Students will understand how to handle the sources on ancient Greek women critically, to apply the basic anthropological models of the family (gender hierarchy vs. gender complementarity), understand the difference between texts with a prescriptive and texts with a descriptive ideological content, and negotiate the gap between the way women were treated in ancient society and how they were represented in its fictions.

• Students will have examined the problems of objectivity raised by examining topics within another culture that are live political issues in their own; have learned to ask how the identities of the producers and consumers of any artefact affect its contents; have acquired the ability and self-discipline to work autonomously, and the capacity for organisation required to meet deadlines and negotiate competing claims on finite resources.

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Lectures will introduce perspectives, and juxtapose them with carefully selected primary texts.
• These texts will be the focus for smaller group work, in which students can gain practice in the theoretical approaches, as weel as a closer understanding of the texts.
• Essays will test students' competence in handling theoretical perspectives, and in applying them to the primary sources.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Two essays for formative assessment will be required, one in each of the Michaelmas and Epiphany Terms.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University