OSH 618 - Classical Literature

Course Description

Classical Literature

Course Description: In this course we will delve into six authors -- one per session. We will read one of the author’s shorter works (under 250 pages) and discuss the longer books. Biographical information on each writer will be presented, as will the context of the writer's time and place.

The goal of the course is to come away with a greater appreciation and enjoyment of these marvelous writers. A lively discussion and exchange of views is part of the fun.

SPRING 1

Week 1: Gulliver’s Travels (edited), Jonathan Swift 1667-1745 (133 pages). Lemuel Gulliver is an English surgeon who wants to see the world. He takes a job on a ship and ends up shipwrecked in the land of Lilliput where he is captured by the miniscule Lilliputians and brought to the Lilliputian king. The Lilliputians are astonished by Gulliver’s size but treat him gently, providing him with food and clothes. He befriends the king and puts out a fire in the palace by urinating on it. There are many more adventures in this excellent edit.

Week 2: Charlotte Temple, Susanna Rowson 1762 -1824 (120 pages). Charlotte Temple is a schoolgirl seduced by a British officer and brought to America, where she is abandoned, pregnant, sick and poor. This “seduction novel” holds that resisting temptation is the only way for women to maintain power and control over their lives. The author was an American novelist, poet, playwright, religious writer, abolitionist, early supporter of female education, stage actress, and educator. She was also the first woman geographer.

Week 3: Little Women, Louisa May Alcott 1832-1888 (280 pages). The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood. It based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, and has inspired generations of young women.

Week 4: All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque 1898–1970 (260 pages). The protagonist, Paul, leads us into the horror of the trenches in World War I. Remarque draws on his experiences as a German soldier. The soldiers’ extreme physical and mental trauma as well as their later detachment from civilian life is presented powerfully. It is credited by some as "the greatest war novel of all time."

Week 5: Kindred Octavia, E. Butler 1947 - (264 pages). A first-person account of Dana, a young African-American, who is repeatedly transported in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 where she lives with her white husband, and an early 19th-century Maryland plantation where she meets some of her ancestors. The white planter who lives there forces her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana stays for longer periods in the past, she becomes entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and ensure her return to her own time. Kindred explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and is characterized as both science fiction and African-American literature.

Week 6: Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh, Mo Yan 1955 - (189 pages).  A collection of connected novellas by the Chinese Nobel prize-winning author Mo Yan. Topics include the harsh abuses of an oppressive society, young lovers trying to find privacy, an abandoned baby brought home by a soldier to his unsympathetic wife; an impoverished child who must subsist on a diet of iron and steel; and a young bride willing to go to any length to escape an odious, arranged marriage. There are metamorphosis-like transformations and amid the casual cruelty of modern governments. The author has been compared to Kafka.

SPRING 2

Week 1: Hans Christian Anderson 1805–1875,   Fairy Tales   (70 pages)
 A prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poem, he is best remembered for his 160 literary fairy tales that have been translated into more than 125 languages. Tales include:  The Red Shoes, The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid, Princess and the Pea, Thumbelina, The Wild Swans, The Little Match Girl, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Loveliest Rose in the World, The Teapot, and The Darning-Needle.  The instructor will provide the material (excerpts).

Week 2: Mary Shelley 1797- 1851  Frankenstein (250 pages)
This is one of the earliest works of science fiction. It tells the story of a gifted scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and his quest to build a human. He succeeds in giving life to a being of his own creation.  However, it is a hideous creature who is rejected by Victor and mankind in general. The downfall of Victor Frankenstein was in failing to consider the moral obligations he had to his creation.

Week 3: Henrik Ibsen 1828 –1906,  A Doll’s House    (85 pages)
A Norwegian married woman lacks opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world. The play was a great sensation and caused a "storm of outraged controversy" that went beyond the theater to the world of newspapers and society.

Week 4: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 - 1944   The Little Prince    (110 pages)
“All grown-ups were once children, but only a few remember it.”
The story follows a young prince who visits various planets and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. It tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behavior through a series of extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth.

Week 5: Margery Allingham 1904 - 1966,  The Case of the Late Pig  (144 pages)
Private detective Albert Campion is summoned to the village of Kepesake to investigate a particularly distasteful death. The body turns out to be that of Pig Peters, freshly killed five months after his own funeral. Soon other corpses start to turn up, just as Peter’s body goes missing. It takes all Campion’s coolly incisive powers of detection to unravel the crime.
    
Week 6: Helen DeWitt 1954 -   The English Understand Wool   (64 pages)
We follow Marguerite, a 17-year old girl raised by her mother (or the woman she believes is her mother) in conditions of utmost wealth. She is aristocratically sophisticated in matters of etiquette and haute couture—’If one goes to Ireland for linen, which is, of course, unavoidable, one must avert one’s eyes from the monstrosities perpetrated’—but she is unschooled in how things really work. She expects her life to continue in its hand-stitched, gold-paved way, but suddenly is pitched into peril by a shocking turn of events.  Can she navigate these shattering developments?  The novella is described as a “wonderfully-rendered tale brimming with the hallmarks of DeWitt’s acerbic, deadpan prose.”

The instructor will send an email to all registrants with links to access the works.

Instructor: Ms. Ronnie Londner