AP/HUMA 4106 6.00

Writing in a Culture of Letters: Ancient Greek Epistolary Literature

This course will trace the epistolary form in ancient Greek literature, exploring issues including: reading, writing, and literacy; rhetoric and education; literary criticism; the relationship between "real" and literary letters; fiction, fakes, and forgeries in antiquity; the ancient novel; sex and eroticism in Greek literature; friendship in Greek culture; public and private; and social status and hierarchy in antiquity.

The course will aim to help students develop a deeper knowledge about a variety of Greek literary texts and of the modern scholarly works that analyze them. Emphasis will be placed on the ways in which the texts being studied are the products of a culture that is both quite different from ours and in many ways poorly understood. The course will highlight the contested modern interpretations of the texts that have inevitably resulted.