CSLC 281 From Rom-Com to Sci-Fi: Hellenistic Literature (and You)

Though we often tend to think of our Greek cultural inheritance as coming exclusively from classical Athens, it was, in fact, the Hellenistic Greeks - those peoples and empires arising after the fall of Athens, in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great - who gave world literature many of its most enduring, familiar (and contemporarily relevant) genres: romantic comedy, travel literature, science fiction, biography, the pastoral, and the self-help manual, to name only the most obvious. Our task in this course will be to try to understand why this vast array of literary types came to matter so much to the Greek-speaking empires of long ago, and why they still seem to matter so much to us today.