CLST/WSGS 295-WI Women in the Classical World Spring Semester 2008

This Writing Intensive course forms part of Loyola's Core Curriculum in Societal and Cultural Knowledge. It will investigate the social roles available to women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, together with beliefs, behaviors, and cultural expressions supporting ancient Greek and Roman constructions of womanhood. How did a woman's gender affect the shape of her life and the possibilities open to her? How did she respond? How did thinking about women, and women's lives and responses, change in relationship to other changes and differences in ancient Greek and Roman societies? Ancient texts (read in translation) and visual representations provide material for study. By analyzing the complex interactions of different forces shaping ancient Greek and Roman women’s lives, students will build understanding of how biology, gender, class, culture, philosophy, politics, history, and economics articulate social difference and influence human behavior, including self-formation and interaction with others.

Our work will pursue four main aims (plus the fifth, of having fun with all of them):

• Studying and inquiring, to gain knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman cultural material concerning women: factual, fictional, theoretical, legendary, historical, sublime, and mundane, woman-authored, male-authored, and anonymous - the Classical world was every bit as complex as our own. Not only did it become an ancestor of modern Western culture, the field of its study fosters skills of multidimensional inquiry and integrative analysis that apply to our world too.
• Thinking critically, to generate and evaluate theories about how gender operated in Classical societies and cultures: how women's being women was understood by women and by men, why these understandings mattered to what women and men did, said, wrote, believed, and valued, and how their understandings changed.
• Exploring diversity, to identify distinctive Classical and gendered patterns of thought and behavior regarding women and gender both within particular communities and across time and cultural difference down to our own world.
• Communicating thoughtfully, to share our understanding and advance it jointly and collaboratively.

TTh 1:00 - 2:15 PM
Information Commons 230
Dr. Jacqueline Long

• Elaine Fantham, Helen Peet Foley, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy, and H. Alan Shapiro, Women in the Classical World (Oxford UP 1994)
• Stanley Lombardo, trans., Hesiod: Works & Days and Theogony (Hackett Publishing 1993)
• James Morwood, trans., Euripides: Medea and Other Plays (Oxford 1954)
• Jeffrey Henderson, trans., Staging Women: Three Plays by Aristophanes (Routledge 1996)
• Mary R. Lefkowicz and Maureen B. Fant, eds., Women's Life in Greece & Rome, 2nd edn. (Johns Hopkins 1992); many selections on-line at http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/wlgr/index.shtml as part of Diotima
• William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th edn. (Longman); the 1st edn. (1918) is available on-line from bartleby.com
• additional resources on-line or in Cudahy Reserves

Writing

• Guide to Writing Academic Papers: a strategic checklist devised by your instructor (hint, hint)
• Guide to Beginning Research on Topics in Classical Studies: suggestions and resources
• Loyola Writing Program's Statement of Grading Standards. As you can see, Harvard University's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning recommends to instructors a similar set of policies for Grading Papers - the document offers extremely useful insight to instructors' objectives for student writing.
• 1st edn. (1918) of William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style: print editions have been updated, but the original still represents the standard American guide to good writing
• How to use apostrophes, or else.
• The the impotence of proofreading by Taylor Mali.

• Diotima: a clearing-house of resources on the Internet for the study of women and gender in the ancient world
• The Perseus Project: an evolving digital library for the study of Greek and Roman antiquity
• Lacus Curtius: a tremendous on-line encyclopedia focusing on the Roman world(s)
• ORB: Late Antiquity in the Mediterranean: the division, devoted specifically to the later Roman world, of The ORB: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies
  
• Bibliography on Women in Byzantium: index of print resources

Revised 19 January 2008 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/