Course Description
Summary
Starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest surviving great work of literature, and then moving through both The Iliad and The Odyssey, hanging a left to catch up with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, before finally returning once again to modern times with Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red, we will explore the tradition of epic poetry in order to discover what makes these epics so...darn...epic. How did these texts establish narrative structures still being used today, how well do we recognize modern day archetypes when placed side-by-side their ancestral brethren, and how were these ancient storytellers (Ann Carson notwithstanding) able to capture a world that still feels so eerily familiar to our modern one.
