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About the Class
The Good Life: Seminar in Ancient to Contemporary Literature
Mondays, 4-6 PM
September to June, 2001-2
Churchill High School
Credit: 5 credits arranged through Churchill
Open to students at all Eugene-Springfield High Schools
Description: This once-a-week, yearlong class is designed
to prepare and recruit minority students for the Clark Honors
College at the University of Oregon. The class meets
once a week from 4-6 at Churchill High School, with 18-25
students, selected from all five high schools, to discuss
literature and writing about literature. In the second
hour of class students meet individually with an Honors College
student mentor, to discuss the readings, work on papers, prepare
presentations, etc. Students also come to the UO for
films or other activities. For more information, please
feel free to contact Sharon Schuman at sschuman@oregon.uoregon.edu
and/or visit the website.
Theme: 'The Good Life" is the theme of my Honors College
literature classes. My course description asks, "How should
we live and what should we value? Some of the greatest (and
worst!) minds in history have attempted to answer this question,
none definitively. Yet it must be answered, both by each of
us individually and by communities. In this course we will
be examining how writers from Ancient Greece through contemporary
America have confronted the most difficult issues of living
together as human beings."
Logistics: Class time will focus on discussion based
on careful reading. It will include group work and writing.
Out of class students will be expected to do reading and some
writing and rewriting. The class requires two hours preparation
per week.
Texts: We begin with Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"
and Dostoevsky's "Rebellion," followed by Maxine Hong Kingston's
"No Name Woman." We also read Socrates' "Apology" and "Crito,"
Pericles' Funeral Oration, and Sophocles' Antigone, as well
as some of the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Inferno, before
moving on to portions of the Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost,
and a Shakespeare play. Book IV of Gulliver's Travels, Melville's
"Bartleby the Scrivner," Kafka's "A Hunger Artist," and Morrison's
Beloved.
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