Latin 301 Catullus Seminar
Spring 2006 T-Th 9:30-10:45 a.m. Murphey 221
Instructor: Jim O'Hara
Tues-Thurs
9:30AM-10:45AM MURPHEY 221
Office: 212 MU (chair’s office) and 319 MU (real office, more Latin
books)
phone: (919) 962-7662
e-mail: jimohara -at - unc.edu (where -at- = @)
my home page: http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj
course home page: http://www.unc.edu/courses/2006spring/latn/301/001
(or see link on http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj )
office hours: ___________ and by appt. or drop-in if
I'm not busy
reserve shelf: Dept Library 316 Murphey (on the right as you walk in)
Course description from
Catalogue:
This seminar will be on the poetry of Catullus. The focus of the
course will take into account student interests, but may include the
following: the influence on Catullus of Callimachus, and of
poetry like the newly discovered epigrams of Posidippus; the style and
poetics of Catullus and the other (largely lost) neoterics; recent work
on the Catullan book or on how different poems may interact; aggressive
language; questions of gender in the poems; recent, non-biographical
approaches to the love-poetry addressed to Lesbia (and Iuventius);
recent attempts to read the poems in their social context, or as
commenting on their social context; claims about indeterminacy or
ambiguity of a number of terms, and poems. The longer poems 61-68
may get special attention.
Books: only one to buy
Thomson, D.F.S., Catullus: edited with a textual and interpretative
commentary (Toronto 1997) (paper)
Other commentaries will be on reserve (3 copies of Fordyce; Kroll is
also good); frequent secondary readings will be on the reserve shelf in
the Classics Library.
Requirements/Procedures:
Only a partial syllabus so far, until I see who’s in the course and
what you want to do. One thing I know is that we will read the
whole of Catullus twice: the first time in about a month, with a number
of basic secondary readings and perhaps some modest reports, the second
time more slowly, with more extensive secondary readings and reports,
perhaps brief readings in other Latin and Greek authors, and a more
tenacious approach to problematic Catullan poems or passages.
Some web pages (coming soon)
Syllabus
Catullus Links