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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2022 |
Registration ID | EMLYB001002 |
Course Title | Emily Balch Seminars-Athena Transformed |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Emily Balch Seminars |
Instructor | Streiter,Nava |
Times and Days | TTh 11:25am-12:45pm
|
Room Location | DAL25 |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2686 The Balch Seminars introduce all first-year students at Bryn Mawr to a critical, probing, thoughtful approach to the world and our roles in it. These challenging seminars are taught by scholar/teachers of distinction within their fields and across academic disciplines. They facilitate the seminars as active discussions among students, not lectures. Through intensive reading and writing, the thought-provoking Balch Seminars challenge students to think about complex, wide-ranging issues from a variety of perspectives. Current topic description: Stern and beautiful, the grey-eyed goddess Athena has always marched to the beat of her own drum. To the ancient Greeks, she was the patron of war and wisdom, a protector of wily heroes and just cities. She was also a divine craftswoman and a perpetual virgin, born fully-grown and well-armed from the head of her father, Zeus. Over the centuries, Athena has become an emblem of freedom, order, the arts, and, crucial, Bryn Mawr College. An archetype of female power, who transcends conformist gender norms, she is at once popular and transgressive, peaceful and militant, indomitable and elusive. This class will explore Athena’s enduring grasp on the world’s imagination, from Homer to the present. How have different authors and artists imagined the cleverest and (perhaps) most powerful woman in the classical pantheon? How do they navigate her complexity and her contradictions? What anxieties about justice and gender do her stories provoke, and what desires do they spark? How do translations and transformations of myth reflect and change the cultures that produce them? We will consider stories, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, and films ranging from Homer and the Parthenon marbles, to medieval songs, early modern paintings, and contemporary comic books and television shows, of course tracing Bryn Mawr College’s own cultic connection to the ancient goddess of war and wisdom. |
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