Pastoral Literature: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, Antiquity

3 units

This course will open with a survey of the classical tradition in pastoral/bucolic. We will consider questions of genre, intertextuality and ideology, and we will ask how 'the lives and loves of herders' became favored ground for literary meditation on issues of surface and depth, reality and illusion, artifice and sincerity. This portion will involve intensive reading in translation of Theocritus, Vergil and Longus. In the second half of the semester, we will consider the survival, adaptation and deformation of ancient pastoral themes, forms and modes of thought in British and American writing from the 19th and 20th centuries. We will read works of Mark Twain, Kenneth Grahame, Thomas Hardy and Tom Stoppard.