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The critical objective of the course this year:

1. Textual analysis: macrocosms and microcosms

The course requires students to read and to understand the general plots of some easy and some very difficult ancient texts in translation. It also requires that each student develop real skills at reading significance from very small and apparently insignificant details.

2. Visual analysis: macrocosms and microcosms

The course requires students to develop real skills at understanding and analyzing a wide variety of visual material from the ancient world. Students are also required to transfer when possible, or even when seemingly impossible, the visual events presented to them and the textual events that they have read.

3. Rhetorical analysis

Students are further required to develop techniques for understanding rhetorical convention and practise in textual and visual material and to apply this in turn to their continuing analysis of both kinds of material. In a very important way this is at the heart of our critical plan. At the end of the course we hope that each student will be able to distinguish the unclear lines between rhetorical and other kinds of events.

4. Developing skills in written analysis

We have planned a series of sessions that flow from lecture to tutorial about developing students' skills in expressing thoughts and conclusions about the material and discussions in the course. We have planned a wide range of written assignments from the trivial to the creative.

5. Asking the critical questions

The objective, right from the opening lecture, is to zero in on the priority of formulating questions over discovering the "right" answer. Our first and second assignments are aimed at this and set the pace for the rest of the course.

6. Developing a language about language

A series of topics to be inserted into appropriate lectures and tutorials about the way in which people have described the how written and oral language work, that is about the grammar of English and other languages. This is both a practical and topical way to bring more understanding to our very foreign texts and pictures and an excellent method for understanding grammatical and syntactic structures

7. Developing professional and performance skills

An important objective of the course this is to develop skills in professional presentation and “performance” in a variety of settings. Students are required to present written reports and “perform” publicly and professionally before an audience of peers and professors. In past versions of the course students have been required in Winter Term to “stage” ritual and/or dramatic events which they have scripted from ancient texts.

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