Perhaps I'm not alone in feeling it strange that registration for the fall semester has started? For me, at least, the ongoing crisis has made of time a kind of viscous fluid in which we're all suspended, whose internal coefficient of friction (μ, mu) seems to bend experience, lensing each passing moment with quickened slowness. The three weeks that have passed since Trinity resumed after Spring Break have felt like months ...
I imagine that for a while to come, too, other things will be reckoned in relation to this thickened, uncertainly meaningful time: 'before,' 'during,' 'after.' Although spring is still unspooling, inevitably that includes the fall. As it happens, I'm slated to repeat a course whose subject-matter is, sadly, likely to be of more relevance than usual.
The course is "Afterlives of Antiquity" (CLAS 1315). I paste the official description below, but roughly, it traces a tradition—from ancient worlds to today—of 'journeys into the underworld' (Greek katábasis) and, closely related, 'encounters with the dead' (nékyia). We study how people have tried, especially in literature and film, to grapple with death.
Naturally--inevitably--that is something we all must try. I suspect that latest spring and summer will bring that into high relief. And so as I look ahead to the course, I'll be thinking, as seriously as I can, about ways of approaching the study with that changed and freighted present history in mind.
In the meantime, below is the official description and a poster showing the films I screened for the course last time; together those should give a sense of the range of materials.
CLAS 1315 - Afterlives of Antiquity
TTh 2:10-3:25pm, CGC 031
In this course we consider stories in which 'a journey into the underworld' (Ancient Greek katábasis) is closely linked to 'an encounter with the dead' (nékyia). Each variation on that ancient theme is a new way of asking, How might art help us respond to the fact of death? Centering our study on the influential depiction of the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, we examine a wide range of authors including Homer (Odyssey), Plato ('The Myth of Er'), Aristophanes (The Frogs), Ovid (Metamorphoses); Dante (Inferno), Shakespeare (The Tempest), Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth), Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland); J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit), Louise Glück (Averno), Yuri Herrera (Signs Preceding the End of the World), Rita Indiana (Tentacle); and the nameless author of the 'Epic of Gilgamesh.'
Linked film screenings
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