Hellenic Studies (2020 - 2022)
Arts and Science Summer in Athens
For information about this program, please visit our website.
Language and Literature
Elementary Modern Greek I, II
HEL-UA 103, 104 Open to students with no previous training in Greek and to others by permission of the instructor. Elementary I offered in the fall; Elementary II offered in the spring. 4 points per term.
Fundamentals of grammar, syntax, oral expression, listening comprehension, reading, and composition. Students develop the skills and vocabulary necessary to read simple texts and hold basic conversations. Students are introduced to modern Greek culture, history, and society.
Intermediate Modern Greek I, II
HEL-UA 105, 106 Prerequisite for HEL-UA 105: Elementary Modern Greek II (HEL-UA 104); prerequisite for HEL-UA 106: HEL-UA 105, or permission of the instructor. Intermediate I offered in the fall; Intermediate II offered in the spring. 4 points per term.
Introduces more complex linguistic and grammatical analysis, advanced composition, and graded reading. Provides further practice in speaking and vocabulary acquisition. Readings and discussions of selected works of prose, poetry, and theatre serve as an introduction to aspects of modern Greek civilization and as an occasion for comprehensive discussions of contemporary Greek society.
Advanced Modern Greek I, II
HEL-UA 107, 108 Prerequisite for HEL-UA 107: Intermediate Modern Greek II (HEL-UA 106); prerequisite for HEL-UA 108: HEL-UA 107, or permission of the instructor. Advanced I offered in the fall; Advanced II offered in the spring. 4 points per term.
Enhances and perfects reading, speaking, conversational, and writing skills through the close study of literary texts, current newspaper articles and essays, films, advertisements, and comprehensive discussions of contemporary Greek society. Explores current social and political issues, events, and controversies in Greece and topics in popular culture.
Memory, History, and Language in Modern Greek Poetry
HEL-UA 120 No prerequisite. Offered every other year. 4 points.
A survey of 20th-century Greek poetry in its historical and cultural context. Among the poets studied are C. P. Cavafy; the Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis; the Lenin Prize winner Yannis Ritsos; the surrealists Andreas Embiricos and Nikos Engonopoulos; the postwar generation of poets, including Miltos Sahtouris, Takis Sinopoulos, and Manolis Anagnostakis; and women poets, including Matsi Hatzilazarou and Kiki Dimoula. All texts are available in both Greek and English; critical texts and class discussion in English only.
Seminar on Modern Greek Culture
HEL-UA 130 Offered every year. 4 points.
Topics vary. Please consult the program for more information.
Theatre and Medicine: From the Greeks to the Modern Stage
HEL-UA 134 Offered every year. 4 points.
Throughout history the stage has offered a platform for the expression of illness, disability, and trauma. The stage has also offered metaphorical ways of conceptualizing ideas of deformity, normality, deviance, and disability. We examine these themes in plays by, among others, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Larry Kramer, and Tony Kushner.
Topics: Modern Greek Culture and Literature
HEL-UA 140 Offered every year. 4 points.
Topics vary. Please consult the program for more information.
Narrative, History, and Fiction in the Modern Greek Novel
HEL-UA 190 Identical to COLIT-UA 190. No prerequisite. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Structured around narrative technique and the claim to fact(s) and/or fiction(s) in Greece’s turbulent modern history. Selections also suggest some recurrent perspectives on questions of language, gender, and nation in Greece. Comparative reference is made to other Balkan, Mediterranean, European, and world literatures. All texts are available in both Greek and English; critical texts and class discussion in English only.
The 20th-Century Balkans and Balkanization through Literature and Film
HEL-UA 193 Identical to COLIT-UA 193. Offered every other year. 4 points.
A selective study of the representation of the 20th-century Balkans through some of the most celebrated literary works and films of the region. Considers the presentation of, and contestation over, a shared historical past through common and divergent motifs, myths, and narrative devices. Also examines the region’s political and aesthetic relation to the West in this century.
Yannis Ritsos and the Tragic Vision
HEL-UA 229 Offered every other year. 4 points.
Ritsos’s poem The Fourth Dimension invokes the relations between memory, history, and language. Examines his poetic strategies by reading and reconstructing the classical intertexts that inform his work and analyzes his appropriations, distortions, revisions, and translations of classical texts.
Greek Tragedy and Modern Greece
HEL-UA 320 Offered every year. 4 points.
Classical Greek tragedy as re-imagined within the broader context of modern Greek culture from the early twentieth century to today. Issues of nationhood, tradition and modernity, classicism, and experimentation. Attention to the specific historico-political contexts (the civil war, the military dictatorship, and the contemporary crisis) of this dialogue with the ancients.
Greek Diaspora: Odyssean Metaphors from Homer to Angelopoulos
HEL-UA 333 Identical to COLIT-UA 333. Offered every other year. 4 points.
How the structuring metaphors and foundational narratives of home and exile and of dispersal, settlement, and return have informed Greek myth and story in a variety of geographical and historical contexts: the diasporic communities of Greeks in Renaissance Venice, in European urban centers prior to nation-building in the 18th-century Enlightenment, in Alexandria and Smyrna (now Izmir) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Cyprus, and in the United States.
From Classicism to Afrocentrism: Greece in the West, 1453 to the Present
HEL-UA 444 Identical to COLIT-UA 444. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Critical interpretation of Western conceptions of the idea of Greece, the Hellenic, and the Greeks in a variety of contexts: classical humanism, classical philology, philhellenism, exoticism, orientalism, Hellenism as paganism, aesthetics, homosexuality, romantic nationalism, racism, the Hellenic and the Hebraic, and Afrocentrism. Features modern Greek appropriations of, and resistances to, such projections.
Greek Thinkers
HEL-UA 700 Identical to CLASS-UA 700. 4 points.
See course description under classics.
Politics
Modern Greek Politics
HEL-UA 525 Offered periodically. 4 points.
Focuses on the socioeconomic and political issues that have defined the nation’s shifting political systems. Topics include the Civil War, the rise and fall of authoritarianism, the transition to democracy, the rise of the Socialist party, Greek nationalism, and the impact of European integration. Emphasis on the cross-cultural contexts of these topics, especially in terms of the relations and conflicts between modern Greece and Western, Eastern, and Balkan cultures.
History
See course descriptions under history in this Bulletin.
Byzantine Civilization
HEL-UA 112 Identical to HIST-UA 112, MEDI-UA 112. 4 points.
Modern Greek History
HEL-UA 159 Identical to HIST-UA 159. 4 points.
Topics: Byzantine History
HEL-UA 283 Identical to HIST-UA 283. 4 points.
Greece and Western Europe
HEL-UA 297 Identical to HIST-UA 297. 4 points.
Topics: Imperial Cities: Rome, Constantinople, Istanbul
HEL-UA 901 Identical to HIST-UA 160. 4 points.
Special Courses
Internship
HEL-UA 980 2 or 4 points.
Consult the program for details.
Independent Study
HEL-UA 997 2 or 4 points.
Consult the program for details.
Senior Honors Seminar
HEL-UA 999 Prerequisite: permission of the program and admission to the honors track. 4 points.
Topics very each term. Students research and write their senior honors thesis under the supervision of a program faculty member. Thesis topic and faculty advisor must be chosen in consultation with the director of undergraduate studies.