Perspectives on the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Course Proposal Narrative
General Education Advisory Committee 
Queens College, City University of New York
Course Title: Classics 150: Greek and Latin Classics in Translation
Primary Contact Name and Email: Joel Lidov (joel.lidov@qc.cuny.edu)
Date course was approved by department: this is an existing course.

Justification

Please describe how the course will address criteria for Perspectives on the Liberal Arts and Sciences courses. 
Be sure to include an explanation of the course’s specific learning goals for students to make a connection between these and the general criteria for Perspectives courses. 

The Introduction to Classical Literature serves the liberal arts curriculum in three, interrelated ways. First, and foremost, the course aims to give students an awareness of some of the Greek and Roman works that have been most prominent in the development of the literature and thought of since the Renaissance.  These works have a long history of being appreciated for their contribution to an understanding of the human situation and the reading, translation, adaptation, and response to these works has shaped a large of part of the intellectual heritage of the West. Knowledge of them enriches the understanding of other works in that heritage. The success of the Western colonial powers in disseminating their educational methods and goals has made the Classical tradition a part of modern culture even in places historically unconnected to the Classical heritage. Secondly, as a literature course, the class seeks to introduce students to methods of analysis that are broadly applicable to many literatures and to other forms of reading; Classical literature is especially useful for examining the role of form, the use of tradition, the incorporation of textual self-reflection, the importance of language choices, and the necessity of taking account of historical context. Thirdly, the reading of these texts can be a basis for reflection on the relation of literature to its social or civic context, both by considering the circumstances of composition (oral performance vs. literary preservation, social and religious function vs. academic or rhetorical study) and by the discussion of ancient texts that explicity reaise the question of the value of the literature.

In class discussions and exams students are expected to show a knowledge of the content of the readings both as a good in itself, since the readings are reference points for later culture, and as a basis for making statements of their own understanding. They should be able to answer basic questions about how inidividual works are constructed to reach their goals and to formulate opinions about the thematic content of the works as statements of wider ranging significance.  

These goals can be specifically applied to the PLAS Criteria:

1 As a literature class, the course stresses the discipline of literary analysis: how the text can be construed as a statement about questions that it implicitly raises or that belong to its historical situation, how different but not unlimited constructions of the same text are possible, and how the questions we bring as modern readers can contribute to the analysis of the text. 

2. The examination of the historical context of production and the explicit discussions of the value of literature found in some texts explores the relation of literature to other disciplines as well as its social role. The questions about, e.g., individual behavior and social roles and obligations, which are especially prominent in these books, promotes a discussion of the ways in which the discipline of literary study differs from and shares with other disciplines in the study of such questions. The actual practice of reading analysis also brings out the aesthetic pleasures which are distinctive to the study of the arts

3. As ancient inquiries into the role of man in the universe, and the meaning of human action, Classical epic, drama, and philosophical literature preeminently “offer[s] students a way of achieving a deeper appreciation of their own lives and insight into the lives and thoughts of others, especially those whose perspectives, because of historical, cultural, racial, and gender differences, are different from their own.” 

5. The study of ancient literature necessarily confronts students with the diverse nature of how we construe what it is to be human generally, of how social roles are created (e.g., Greek vs. barbarian, citizen vs. slave, superior vs. inferior) and of how cultural difference creates different models of gender roles and sexuality.

6. Although there is no expectation of extensive research for this course, all instructors assign a paper topic that asks the student to take on the task of actively inquirying into a work or topic by formulating their own opinion through an analysis of a single work or investigating a topic beyond what is presented in class.

7. The course covers two cultures over a thousand years and inevitably involves the problem of change.

8. All course materials are original documents.

The course is fundamentally about the European Tradition and entirely Pre-Industrial.

Criteria Checklist
Please be sure that your justification addresses all three criteria 1-3, below.  For criteria 4-8, please check all that apply and discuss these in your justification.
A Perspectives course must:

1. Be designed to introduce students to how a particular discipline creates knowledge and understanding.
2. Position the discipline(s) within the liberal arts and the larger society.
3. Address the goals defined for the particular Area(s) of Knowledge the course is designed to fulfill.
	In addition, a Perspectives course will, where appropriate to its discipline(s) and subject matter:

4. Be global or comparative in approach.
5. Consider diversity and the nature and construction of forms of difference.
6. Engage students in active inquiry.
7. Reveal the existence and importance of change over time.
8. Use primary documents and materials.	

Course Materials, Assignments, and Activities
Please provide an annotated list of course readings and descriptions of major assignments or exams for the course, as well as distinctive student activities that will engage students in working toward the course goals discussed in the course description and/or justification.
Please include the author and title for each reading or text, along with a short description providing information about how the reading will contribute to course goals.
READINGS: The following list, represents a general structure that individual syllabus will be based on. For each a comment is attached that shows how the reading can be related to a specific goal of understanding literature in a liberal arts context; each of course also has its own thematic value as a work of literature, and raises specific disciplinary problems of interpretation. This is not an exhaustive list of works which might be included, and emphases will differ among instructors.

I. Homer, Odyssey.  
The circumstances of the oral tradition that produced the works of Homer are beyond recovery, and so are the motive and exact moment of the first written versions. Read by itself, the Odyssey illustrates the long-lived theme of the  journey as the experience of individual growth in understanding and as a study of the relation of individual and society (or universe). But we do know that Peisistratus, tyrant in Athens in mid-sixth century, saw to the creation of an official version of the poem. Why would  it serve the interests of a tyrant of one city to have a definitive version of a widely distributed epic poem about universal experience?

II. Greek Tragedy (selected tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides)
Greek Tragedies were grounded in a very specific historical situation: they were composed for performance as part of a major religious and civic festival and are strongly marked by contemporary social and political concerns. We tend to read them now as dramatic stories and as independent statements about the human condition. What is the connection between tragedy as particular contribution to the life of the Athenian state and a reading that does not attach it to a particular social purpose?

III. Plato’s attack on Tragedy (selection from the Republic)
Plato’s depiction of an ideal education, in the Republic, expels tragedy and epic from the education of the citizen. Why do we reject his condemnation?

IV. Roman adaptation of Greek literature: selection of drama and/or lyric; also lecture topic.
Roman literature is develops, to a very large extent, from the Roman’s appropriation of Greek literature for their own purposes. This process is mirrored in the appropriation of Greek and Roman literature by the  modern West. Plautus’s comedies in particular illustrates the recasting of one culture as a vehicle for exploring another. This can also be seen in Seneca’s adaption of Euripidean tragedy (later to be adapted again by Shakespeare), and in the work of the lyric poets Catullus and Horace. 

V. Cicero: the defense of literature (Pro Archia or other reading) and the role of literature in rhetoric.
In the Pro Archia, Cicero, defending a poet, defends literature to a possibly hostile public. He emphasizes and illustrates its value in rhetoric, as a source of moral instruction, and as an  inducement to public-spirit. Literature is not separated from history in this argument, and the emphasis on moral values is also found in Livy’s preface to his History, and in many passages in Plutarch. Does this defense really reflect the actual activity of poetry and history-writing? In his rhetorical writings and other essays Cicero argues for the importance of a knowledge of literature in public life.

V. Literature and Politics: Augustus and the Poets (Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid).
Augustus, after he brutally established an imperial regime, sponsored the writing of the Aeneid, and it does superficially confer glory on his own activities. But there is a also a “dark” reading of the Aeneid that calls attention to loss rather than gain. Other poetry of the period (love elegy, the work of Catullus and Ovid) is more explicitly ambivalent or rejects outright the idea of a political good in the exercise of power, often using erotic content as a vehicle. To a large extent these are books about timeless human experience—exile, love, ambition—it is also profitable to read this poetry within its political context.

VI. The transformation of tradition: Petronius, Satyricon or Apuleius, The Golden Ass
Both of these works are adventure narratives incorporating erotic, and sometime romantic, entertainments, and both give a new twist to the motif of the individual journey, first illustrated in the Odyssey. The former is a social commentary but also a commentary on the literary tradition of epic; the latter is, in the end, a tale of religious enlightment. Each invites reflection on the motifs of the earlier works in the course, and shows how the literary tradition responds to changing social circumstance as the Classical period comes to an end. 

PAPERS: two types of papers have commonly been assigned in earlier versions of the course, depending on instructor’s preference, and both are possible in the PLAS context (there are advantages to both). In one the student is guided to study a single work more intensively, by taking two passages or quotations and explaining their significance in the work as a whole. In the other there is a freer choice of topic, allowing the student to pursue an individual interest after consultation with the instructor, so that they use the knowledge acquired in the course to go to something beyond it.

Assessment
Perspectives courses must be recertified every five years, and we are seeking ideas for how to best carry out this assessment.  What forms of evidence that the course is meeting its goals as a Perspectives course would be appropriate to collect for this course during the next five years?  How would you prefer assessment to be conducted?  How might evidence of effective teaching and student learning be collected and evaluated?

Samples of student exams and papers will be collected and reviewed to see if the specific goals are in fact being addressed by the course and can be responded to by the students. The ideal assessment of this course would probably be retrospective: surveying students after they reach their junior year on how the course had affected their understanding of the rest of their education. 

Administration
What process will your department develop to oversee this course, suggest and approve changes, and conduct assessment?  Who will be in charge of this process?  Also indicate whether the course will be primarily taught by full-time or adjunct faculty, or by a combination of the two types of instructor.

We envision that the course will be taught either by the Classics faculty or by adjuncts who are mostly graduate students in the GC Classics program, in which most of the faculty (i.e, two out of three people) also teach. Informally, therefore, the course is a communal effort of a small group. Formally, each disciplinary division in our department has a coordinator who will be responsible for hiring and discussing the course with the adjuncts, and observing them and keeping track of their progress, and for discussing the course with the other faculty in the department. The coordinators work closely with the chair and it is our intention that they work with each other to maintain consistent standards for PLAS courses throughout the deparment.