Literature offers us an immensely rich and diverse gallery of lives and aspects of lives. We will be selecting a few of the most celebrated of these from European poetry, drama, prose fiction and philosophy. We will consider some English-language texts but will use mainly non-English texts in standard translations, from pre-classical Greece to classics of Romanticism and beyond, attempting to identify some key assumptions, practices and concerns in how they are shaped. How do these writers, these, model a life, a person, a self? What sorts of value do these various models have for us? How do they work in our own lives? Writers/texts considered will include Homer's Iliad, Sophocles' Antigone, Dante's Inferno, a Shakespeare play and Goethe's Faust I, as well as a course brick of extracts from texts including a Plato dialogue, Aeneid IV, St Mark's Gospel, Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue, Rousseau's Reveries and Proust's Swann's Way.

In-class exercise and 1,500 word essay (50%) and final two-hour examination (50%).

Any two English courses.

Sophocles, Antigone, Oxford World's Classics