Dactylic Hexameter seminar
Professor Jacques A. Bailly
Classics Dept.
231 Old Mill
jacques.bailly@uvm.edu
Office Hours: TR 1-2
jacques.bailly@uvm.edu
This syllabus is posted on the web . Any paper
syllabus you hold in your hand should be thrown away: it is
not the official syllabus. The official syllabus is on-line.
If I have to change it, I will announce the changes in class
once and will put up the new version on the web, which is the
official syllabus.
Attendance Policy: Come to class. Note the period.
Texts:
Find them whereever good texts are found.
Grades: Grades are strange things in an upper level
language class. We're doing this to further personal projects and
ambitions, not for a grade or a diploma, or to kill time. There is
also the aspect that for better or worse, there is a professor in
the room and they are the one who records and to a certain extent
determines your grade, and who might write you a letter. You're
here to impress yourself and the rest of us, and to help the rest
of us, so do that. Often. Excellently. In many ways.
The things that we will do:
Read Greek: we'll go over gobbets of text in class,
but we cannot cover everything assigned in class.
Explain a sentence and find
thing(s) of interest in it: One way to more fully
cover material that we can't cover in class. Every class session,
you will, round robin style, do this for one sentence of our current
text.
Ask questions: We'll
have three google documents:
- Particular detailed questions about the text that we are
reading: these should be the sorts of things that have right
answers, things like points of grammar, metrical quandaries, and
the like: ask at least one question here every class period.
- More general questions: these are interpretive questions, ones
that take thought and don't have one right answer (but they do
have a lot of wrong answers): ask at least one question here
every class period.
- Your sentence analyses.
- : ask at least one question on someone else's sentence
material (not necessarily on the sentence itself)
here every class period.
Answer questions:
- Answer one question on each of 1-3 above. For #2, your answer
should be enough to give the general idea and how you would go
about testing it, what sort of evidence you would look to find.
Present secondary material: Each week, find an article or
book chapter that has not been assigned to the whole class, one
that interests you on the material we are covering, read it, make
a fairly detailed bullet point summary of it, post that in the
shared google folder, and explain the basic research gap the
article fills and how it does it to the class in 5 minutes or
less.
Procedure in Class:
We go through the Greek and present material in class.
Typically, we mostly read Greek.
Sometimes we show off our newfound knowledge (i.e. an exam).
Midterms and Final: Over half translation, but some other
ways to cause ourselves productive growing pains (e.g. ask about
grammar, meter, or other things we have covered or should cover).
There will be at least one midterm: you may ask for more if you feel
it would be more productive to review at some point.
Project: You need to think of a project and do it. You will
make a proposal to me, which we will then discuss and finalize. The
project should involve or be a research paper.
Other Things: Let's organize a good Homer-a-thon.
Not mandatory and not for credit, but important.
Schedule:
Homer Odyssey 9
Theocritus Idylls 11 and 6
Callimachus Hymn 3 To Artemis
which pretty much winds up the Cyclopean tour
and then a couple days of Hexametrical Fingerfood Tapas: each of
us finds two authors/works in DH, reads them (in English), and
presents them to the class: Nonnus? Aratus? Moschus? Bion?
Batrachomyomachia? Homeric Hymns?
Followed by a hard turn to more DH:
Apollonius: unless someone has a different/better idea,
let's start at the beginning of Argonautica and go from there.