Week10

Introduction to Western Literature:

1.      Genre: is any category of literature, music or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria.

2.      Iphigenia: a daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra, and thus princess of Argos.

The Sacrifice of Iphigenia

3.      Gospel: an account describing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The most widely known examples are the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John which are included in the New Testament, but the term is also used to refer to apocryphal gospels, non-canonical gospels, Jewish-Christian gospels, and gnostic gospels.

4.      Conversion: a change or adaptation in form, character, or function

5.      Youth is a state of mind.

6.      Dionysus: God of the Vine, Grape Harvest, Winemaking, Wine, Ritual Madness, Religious Ecstasy, and Theatre.

2nd-century Roman statue of Dionysus

7.      Apollo: God of music, poetry, art, oracles, archery, plague, medicine, sun, light and knowledge.

Apollo Belvedere

8.      Delphi: is both an archaeological site and a modern town in Greece on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus in the valley of Phocis.

The Delphic Tholos

9.      Theatre: a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage.

10.  Prophet: an individual who is claimed to have been contacted by the supernatural or the divine, and to speak for them, serving as an intermediary with humanity, delivering this newfound knowledge from the supernatural entity to other people. The message that the prophet conveys is called a prophecy.

11.  Oracle: a person or agency considered to provide wise counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods. As such it is a form of divination.

12.  Pythia: commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi, was the name of any priestess throughout the history of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, beneath the Castalian Spring.

Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia

13.  Dithyramb: an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god: Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysus, called, I think, the dithyramb. Plato also remarks in the Republic that dithyrambs are the clearest example of poetry in which the poet is the only speaker.

Attic relief depicting an aulos player and his family standing before Dionysos and a female consort, with theatrical masks displayed above.

14.  Medea: a sorceress who was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his daughter, Glauce. The play tells of Medea avenging her husband's betrayal by killing their children.

Medea by Evelyn De Morgan

1.      Watch Detachment (2011):

2.      Watch A Moment of Excellence: