Module CLAS3461: ANCIENT LITERARY CRITICISM

Department: CLASSICS AND ANCIENT HISTORY

CLAS3461: ANCIENT LITERARY CRITICISM

Prerequisites

• None.

Corequisites

• For students in the Classics Department, please refer to the Regulations for your Degree Programme. For students from other Departments, there are no corequisites.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• To introduce students with previous experience of Greek and Roman authors to the theoretical models, controversies, and analytical methods developed by ancient critics of literature.
• To train them in comparing ancient literary theory with poetic practice, both oral composition and literary composition.
• To investigate the conceptual foundations of western literary theory.
• The syllabus, studied in English translation, includes Plato's Republic 2-3, 10 and 'Ion', Aristotle's Poetics, Longinus 'On the Sublime', Horace's 'Ars Poetica' and Tacitus 'Dialogue on Orators'.

Content

• The module will tackle theoretical views of literature developed by the ancients themselves.
• As well as exploring issues of aesthetics, it will look at the social, moral and political implications of literary theory, and ask what effects, good and bad, literature was believed to have.
• Finally, it will consider whether ancient theory is ultimately adequate to an appreciation of ancient literary practice.

Learning Outcomes

• The student will have acquired an advanced literary critical vocabulary and the ability to use it actively; an intellectual grasp of cognitive issues and ethical controversies in Greek aesthetics; understanding of and fluency in the fundamental ancient vocabulary of criticism - mimesis, drama, hedone, ophelimon, prepon, catharsis, eleos, phobos, enargeia.

• The student will have acquired the ability to compare different theoretical models and to justify a preference between them; the ability to understand how literary critical issues affected other ancient genres (e.g. historiography, satire); an understanding of the different evaluative criteria related to oral and written genres of literature, and the ability to engage with alien patterns of thought, culture and expression.

• Students will 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. They will have a sophisticated appreciation of the possibilities and limitations of expression in different languages in a range of intellectual contexts; the capacity to sustain at a sophisticated level a clear, well-structured and well-defended argument in written form.

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

• The nature of this course, which is conceptually advanced, requires both lectures and seminars, assessed course work and assessment by examination.
• The formative essay is intended to allow the students to consolidate their grasp of the set texts, while the second, summative essay, builds on this knowledge and is more theoretically stretching.
• The lectures examine the primary sources in close detail, while the seminars require students to infer synthetic conceptual connections between the different instances of primary data connections which lie at the centre of the summative essay topic.

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