CLAS3371: Myth, Memory & History

• CLAS1301 or CLAS1601

• None.

• None.

• Is designed as an advanced third-year module, presupposing some of the generic critical and interpretive skills that will have been acquired in the first and second years.
• It will focus on further developing students' critical faculties, especially their ability to use and compare different types of evidence and their ability to understand and criticise complex texts, arguments, and visual images.
• This module is in the context not only of a (partly) distant culture, but of several different types of source material and author.

• An interdisciplinary study, involving literary, artistic and philosophical discourses, of ancient and pertinent modern models for recovering and interpreting the past in ancient Greece and Rome. Authors studied in this course may include Home, Hesiod, selected Athenian dramas, Herodotus, ancient mythography, Plato, Cicero, Augustus, Virgil and Ovid.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students should be aware of the most important literary and artefactual evidence for ancient approaches to the nature and function of memory, and of the role of medium in the making of memory. Students should be not only acquainted with but competent in the comparative evaluation and critique of different types of source material for ancient intellectual history. Students should also have an understanding of the ancient terminology used by poets, philosophers, mythographers and historians involved in defining cognition, literacy and memory.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students should be competent in interdisciplinary thinking, i.e. have developed an ability to draw connections between the different types of subject-matter found in the contexts of ancient Greek and Roman private, civic and social life. They should be able to demonstrate a sophisticated ability to handle translated texts, and an ability to select and apply appropriate methodologies to divergent types of evidence.

Key Skills:

• Students will be able to think independently and 'outside the box' of conventional wisdom. They will have acquired the capacity to sustain at a sophisticated level a clear, well-structured and well-defended argument in written form, and to understand the possibilities and limitations of expression in different intellectual contexts and different languages.

• Teaching will be by means of lectures and seminars, the seminars allowing a large element of group discussion, under the aegis of the tutor.
• Tutorials will be designed to provide individual feedback on the students' formative and summative essays and prepare them for the final examination.
• The formative and summative essays ensure that students engage with the issues discussed in the course.

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