G.R.O.U.P. Courses

Courses are designed as joint faculty-student explorations with the potential of evolving over time into new curricula and programs. Courses are normally team-taught by faculty members from different departments; they may also be taught by one faculty member who brings in guest speakers to provide diverse perspectives. All G.R.O.U.P. courses involve teaching that comes directly out of the instructors’ active research, allowing students to engage with open issues, and not simply presenting a finished product.

G.R.O.U.P. Course offerings 2009-2010

Please check the Schedule of Classes for details as to the semester offered, class hours, and any course restrictions or prerequisites for the following undergraduate classes offered in 2009-2010.

The Epic: Imagined Communities and the Classical Epic
Charles Altieri, English (altieri@berkeley.edu)
Maura Nolan, English (mnolan@berkeley.edu)
(English 180E)

This course will focus on the classical epic as one important record of how cultures become self-conscious about the relation between their ideals and their practices. Because the epic was the most central text in the culture, each succeeding culture had to remake that form; tracing those revisions in terms of authors' revising an entire imagination of the powers of their distinctive culture can be very exciting. The course will also address how the emotional demands epic texts make on readers change as they revise their predecessors. Moving from the pre-classical Greeks to Romanticism, the class will read and discuss the Iliad, the Odyssey, The Aeneid, two books of the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth's Prelude.

G.R.O.U.P. course offerings 2008-09.
G.R.O.U.P. course offerings 2007-08.
G.R.O.U.P. course offerings 2006-07.
G.R.O.U.P. course offerings 2005-06.
G.R.O.U.P. course offerings 2004-05.