Global Arc

This course is for students who have a solid knowledge of ancient or medieval Greek and want to study Modern Greek as a foreign language and the evolution of the Greek language, from ancient to modern. Students will learn to respond to basic communicative situations, when traveling to Greece for study or research. The course will stress language acquisition proficiency and literacy, and will also lead students to re-approach their knowledge of Greek (including changes in grammatical and syntactical use). Focus on contemporary Greek culture, as well as a wide range of readings, from Homer to the present.

This course explores Greek modernism in literature, art, and architecture in its relation with global modernism. The course is structured around two historical moments: the 1930s and the 1960s. The formidable power of the "generation of the 1930s" and the modernist experiments of the 1960s are seen in their historical context, Greek, European, and global: what preceded these explosions of modernist aesthetics in Greece? How did they relate with global developments of the time? What has been excluded from the narrative of the "generation of the 1930s" or the 1960s, who were the misfits and how did they fertilize Greek culture?

Three historical themes shaped Byzantine Europe: the inheritance of Byzantine political ideology with its complex relations between state and church; the encounter with Western Europe; and the concept of political reform. Dreams of Byzantium, theocracies, and utopias of political modernity crossed a space of shared culture and created a sense of community despite political boundaries until the national idea built up frontiers of territorial identities. The fate of these ideas and their political fertility invites us to reflect on the concept of ideology and its instrumentality in the construction of the State.

An intensive interdisciplinary study of the evolution of a city, such as Athens, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Alexandria, or Antioch, where Greek civilization flourished through successive periods, from antiquity to the present. A study of the form and the image of the city as seen in its monuments and urban fabric, as well as in the works of artists, writers, and travelers. Prerequisite: instructor's permission. Two 90-minute classes.

Over the past 3,000 years, texts written in Greek played a central role for how people in Western Eurasia understood themselves, their society, their values, and the nature of the universe. Over the same three millennia, the Greek language played a central role in a variety of political communities, including ancient Athens, the empire of Alexander, the Roman empire, Byzantium, and the modern nation state of Greece. In this course, we will trace the history of these two phenomena: the political life and fortunes of Greek speakers and the cultural life of texts written in Greek, seeking to understand the relationship between the two.