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The Ancient Novel? Magic, Myth, and Metamorphosis

  • All levels
  • 21 and older
  • $315
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions

Start Dates (0)

  • $315
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions
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Class Description

Description

What you'll learn in this lecture class:

Is the novel an intrinsically modern form? Are prose works like SatyriconDaphnis and Chloe, and The Golden Ass actually ancient novels? These narratives of ancient Greece and Rome offer a kaleidoscopic array of fictions: pastoral tales of erotic exploration; fierce satires of urban life and aristocratic rapacity; fantastical accounts of metamorphosis, abjection, and (maybe) redemption. With their mix of pirates and brigands, magic spells and witches, raunchy sex, divine visitations, mythological fantasias, and riffs on the philosophical tradition, the ancient novel obliterates any easy definition of genre, even as its narrative pleasures redouble. How can we understand the techniques, strategies, and motivations of the ancient novel—a literary object on the one hand formally familiar, on the other, deeply strange? What social conditions gave rise or impetus to narrative prose-writing, despite the available forms of poetry, dialogue, and drama? What subjectivities did ancient novels express—or invent? What does it mean to call them novels, at all? 

In this course, we will read and discuss the three of the most popular fictions of Greek and Latin literature, as we think through questions of genre, social context, and the commensurability, or incommensurability, of the Ancient and the Modern. We’ll begin with Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, which recounts the erotic education of its hero and heroine, while provoking questions about the relation of nature and art, and of nature and gender: is sex ever simply “natural”? Next, we’ll turn to Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses), a proto-picaresque account of its hero’s literal and metaphoric journeys from human to animal to priest of Isis. Finally, we’ll read Petronius’ Satyricon, which brings to the fore the life of the lower classes of Rome, while turning its coruscating, ribald, and critical eye upon the corruptions of the city and of the rich and powerful. All three of our novels have had especially productive and varied reception histories, as sources and touchstones for, amongst others, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Goethe, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot. Freed from the constraints of myth and of history, the ancient novel delights in its own powers of invention, in the making of its own extravagant fictions. As we read Daphnis and ChloeThe Golden Ass, and Satyricon, we will ask: what were, and are, the uses of these fictions—as rewritings of myth and philosophy, as educational narratives, as social critique, and as the invention of new worlds?

Remote Learning

This course is available for "remote" learning and will be available to anyone with access to an internet device with a microphone (this includes most models of computers, tablets). Classes will take place with a "Live" instructor at the date/times listed below.

Upon registration, the instructor will send along additional information about how to log-on and participate in the class.

Refund Policy

  • Upon request, we will refund less 5% cancellation fee of a course up until 6 business days before its start date.
  • Students who withdraw after that point but before the first class are entitled to 75% refund or full course credit.
  • After the first class: 50% refund or 75% course credit.
  • No refunds or credits will be given after the second class.

In any event where a customer wants to cancel their enrollment and is eligible for a full refund, a 5% processing fee will be deducted from the refund amount.

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research was established in 2011 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Its mission is to extend liberal arts education and research far beyond the borders of the traditional university, supporting community education needs and opening up new possibilities for scholarship in the...

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