This course will introduce you to cultures of ancient Sumer, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome through an examination of their conceptions and expressions of love, desire and sexuality as well as gender. These ideas are culturally determined and reflect important cultural assumptions potentially very different from our own. We will engage in an interdisciplinary study using a variety of literary genres including lyric poetry, love letters, philosophical dialogue, didactic poetry, the romance novel, material culture and art. The focus of this study will introduce a wide range of topics for discussion including the split between physical and spiritual love, philosophic ideals of “love” and “beauty,” perceptions of appropriate gender roles, physical ideals of female and male beauty, the different conceptions of human sexuality.
Learning Objectives:
- To explore concepts of love, sex, and gender as well as sexuality uncovered by archaeology and illuminated by textual sources.
- To gain a greater understanding of how different cultures from antiquity expressed their sometimes radically different and sometimes very similar notions of love, sex, etc.
- To gain the ability to speak knowledgeably about the topics, artifacts, and cultures covered in this course.
Learning Outcomes
The overall goal of this course is to help students break down assumptions about the givenness of dominant notions of gender and sexuality. You should be able to walk away from this course with a greater appreciation of the diversity in the human experience, while at the same time gaining insight into some of the unifying experiences that we share as humans across cultures. By exploring these topics using the context of antiquity, you will hopefully come to the conclusion that the issues, experiences, the debates, the discussions, etc., that is part of our contemporary world is not new. Nothing is new under the sun.
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