Current course offerings

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Course description

How does American culture continue to make epic and epic-like modes relevant? Epic is traditionally defined as a long narrative poem, evoking Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Medieval sagas and epics such as Beowulf. However, epic can be understood more broadly as a long narrative with an ambitious scope, concerned with key issues such as crossing boundaries, challenging the wilderness, embarking on major quests, and heroically defining the self against larger social forces. Over time, and especially since the Civil War, artists and writers of all identities have found themselves drawn to epic's potential, and have made epic one of the most central modes of American culture. In this course, you will study American texts from a very diverse range of voices across the forms of literature, theatre, film, and music to learn how these different texts engage with the idea and the mode of epic to define, reify, and challenge existing concepts of what it means to be American.

Archived offerings