English 321: Backgrounds of Western Literature: From Achilles to Arthur
Summer Session One intensive: 5/22 to 6/9 Daily, 10:30 –1:15 Kuykendall304
Professor Mark Heberle (heberle@hawaii.edu) Kuykendall 315 956-3032
This intensive three-week reading course will combine extensive reading and intensive discussion of five foundational sources of Western literature and culture: ancient epic, Greek tragedy, classical mythology, the Christian Bible, and Arthurian romance. In addition to full texts of the ODYSSEY, OEDIPUS, ANTIGONE, GENESIS, and MATTHEW, excerpts from the ILIAD, AENEID, METAMORPHOSES, EXODUS, ISAIAH, REVELATION, and Sir Thomas Malory’s MORTE DARTHUR will comprise our reading. We will be reading about 300–500 pages of literature each week and discussing the daily reading in class-wide or smaller groups, with instructor guidance at the beginning and end of each class. Besides the extensive reading schedule of great and wonderful works and mandatory attendance and in-class participation, requirements are relatively minimal: quizzes on all completed readings, a comparative paper, and a final exam (take-home essay and in-class, open book final test).
Films related to some of the works will be available outside class, with extra credit available for reports on the viewings.
The instructor, Professor Mark Heberle of the UHM English Department, has taught courses on Shakespeare, John Milton, Renaissance Epic, Renaissance Non-Dramatic Literature, English Renaissance War Literature, and the Bible. His most recent publication was a review of Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English (Columbia University Press, 2015), translated from the Japanese original by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter, and his current research project is an article on Shakespeare’s Henry V. He is the author of Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, the editor of Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam Film, Literature and Art, and the co-editor (with Naomi Sokoloff and Elizabeth Goodenough) of Infant Tongues: the Voice of the Child in Literature.
English 321 fufills pre-1660 historical breadth requirements for English majors as well as DL graduation requirements