European Literature & Thought: Course Outline

During the autumn term at Jogakuin Daigaku I teach GCE and visiting students a course in European Literature and Thought.

I love teaching this course, but the title always amuses me. Fifteen classes to cover not only the whole breadth of European literature,” but also “European thought.”

My approach is to begin with Homer and to focus on a different writer each week, offering a variety of genres and styles across the ages and from as many different countries as possible.

Where possible I seek to present a clear image from each writer, something that the students can fix their imagination on; for example, the image of Plato’s cave, or of Frankenstein’s monster.

In addition, I relate the literary styles to the visual arts where possible. In recent years, smart phones enable students to look up my references for themselves.

I also repeatedly emphasise lines of influence from one writer to another as the course progresses. With a writer such as Ovid, it is possible to show his influence in later paintings and statuary, such as Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne.

Since the scope of the course is so large, and as it is not my speciality, I excluded Russian literature. However, from 2019 I hope to include Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, and quite possibly replace Stendhal with Tolstoy.

If I drop Stendhal, I would want to add at least one other work of French literature. One option would be to drop the introductory lecture at the beginning of the course and add Camus’ The Stranger as the fifteenth lecture.

German literature is also almost entirely passed over although I usually mention Luther and Goethe and include the Czech writer, Kafka, who wrote his novels in German. This is somewhat compensated for in my talk on Realism when I invite students to compare the Romantic and Realist styles of German painters. From 2019 I hope to find a slot for Nietzsche.

Here is the curriculum in its current form:

Week	Era	Location	Theme	Writer	Work
1			Introduction to the course.
2	c. 800 BC	Ancient Greece	Epic Poetry	Homer	Iliad
3	500-300 BC	Classical Greece	Greek Philosophy	Plato	Republic
4	50 BC-50AD	Rome	Latin Poets & Orators	Ovid	Metamorphoses
5	50-500 AD	Italy	Christianity, Neo-Platonism & The Dark Ages	Boethius	Consolation of Philosphy
6	1250-1350	Italy	Christian Epic Poetry	Dante	Divine Comedy
7	1300s	Italy	The Renaissance & Love Sonnets	Petrarch	Fragments of Common Things
8	1469-1527	Italy	Political Realism	Machiavelli	The Prince
9	1537-1616	Spain	Europe’s First Novel	Cervantes	Don Quixote
10	1564-1616	England	English Renaissance Drama	Shakespeare	**
11	1600s-1700s	Ireland	Enlightenment, Neo-Classicism & Satire	Swift	Gulliver’s Travels
12	1780s-1850s	England	Romanticism & Gothicism	Shelley	Frankenstein
13	1800s	France	Realism	Stendhal	Scarlet & Black
14	1883-1924	Austro-Hungarian Empire	Modernism	Kafka	Metamorphosis
15	1882-1940	England	Modernism & Stream of Consciousness	Woolf	Mrs Dalloway’s Diary

** The topic of the Shakespeare class varies from course to course.