COMP 244
Helen, Desire and Language
Last Offered Spring 2006
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed WGST 224 / CLAS 224
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

When Homer’s Iliad introduces us to “Helen of Troy,” she is a perfectly beautiful and baleful cause of the Trojan War and, simultaneously, among its most sympathetic and innocent victims. In her struggle to be a desiring agent and not simply the passive screen onto which others project their own desires, Helen stands both inside the narrative, as a character created by it, and outside, as a commentator on the story and her own role in it. Through Helen as much as any other character, the Iliad explores the relation between logos and eros. Because Helen remains a key figure in Greek discourse of language and desire, and of death, loss, memory, repetition and substitution, we will focus on texts in which Helen figures prominently, including the Iliad and Odyssey, lyric poems by Sappho, Alcaeus, and Steisichorus, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides’s Helen, and Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, and we will consider Helen in the graphic arts and religious cults. We will also venture into texts and arenas where Helen herself is not prominent or even mentioned but where thematics familiar from stories involving her are at play, e.g. Hesiod on the Muses, Pandora, Aphrodite, and Metis, several tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides, the Athenian cult of Persuasion, women’s roles in familial and communal cults, and (if time permits) Plato’s Symposium or Phaedrus.
Among the questions we will ask: Why do discussions of logos regularly become discussions of eros, and vice-versa? Why do “feminine” activities–weaving, storing and preparing food, bearing children, caring for the dead–and why do traits particularly associated in Greek culture with females–lying and seductiveness, for instance–figure prominently in the discourse of logos and eros? Does this discourse engender as “feminine” poets, texts, and characters who, like Achilles and Odysseus as well as Helen, become “poets” within the texts that have created them? Where is “masculinity” located in this discourse?
Students may devise a final paper involving later literature either about Helen or otherwise relevant to the issues in this course.
The Class: Format: discussion with some short lectures
Limit: 19
Expected: 10
Class#: 3543
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active participation in class discussion, one or two oral presentations, several shorter papers and a longer final paper (more than 20 pages total)
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: students who have previously studied some of the literature being read and to majors in Classics, Comparative Literature, Literary Studies, English and other literatures and in Women's and Gender Studies
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: meets Division 1 requirement if registration is under CLAS or COMP; meets Division 2 requirement if registration is under WGST 224
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
WGST 224 Division I CLAS 224 Division I COMP 244 Division I

Class Grid

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