Great Stories

Stories are important. They are how we keep track of great (or awful) things that have happened, how we teach our children, how we understand strangers. They help us stay connected with our past and dream about our future. It is with this in mind that we will consume the great stories of Western civilization (World Literature will cover the others) with the hope that we will be inspired, enlightened, and entertained.

Course Description

The purpose of this class is to help us all gain a better understanding of the human condition—what it means to be a person. We continue to read (and allude to) these ancient great stories because they have tapped into something that tells us what it means to be human. To this end, we will work (through discussion and writing) to find connections between these works and modern ones, how to decode a Symbol or Metaphor, and how to unlock the meaning of a difficult story or Poem using other works.

The Reading List

Our primary text in this course will be Rolfe Humphries’ translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. While Ovid was Roman, not Greek, his telling of the stories is always lively, sometimes melancholy, sometimes horrifying. Ovid was Shakespeare’s main source of Greek mythology

So I hope none of you take offence when religious texts are lumped together with stories no one believes true. Both types of stories are important to us in this course, and for the same reason: these stories have impacted people and their understanding of the world since the day they were first told.