[MGSA-L] Yale University Spring Courses

[Syrimis, George]

Hellenic Studies Program
Yale University

Spring 2012 Courses

MGRK 120: Elementary Modern Greek (L2)
Maria Kaliambou
MTWThF 9.25-10.15
An introduction to modern Greek with emphasis on reading, writing, speaking and oral comprehension. The course will cover all major noun and adjective groups and their declension; the basic verb conjugations, all tenses, active and passive voice, as well as the basic uses of the subjunctive mood; basic daily vocabulary; the basic syntactical structure of Greek.


MGRK 140: Intermediate Modern Greek (L4)
Maria Kaliambou
MTWThF 10.30-11.20
The course intends to develop the student’s proficiency in understanding, speaking, reading and writing modern Greek. Exposure to contemporary cultural material (newspapers, Greek websites, films, literary and musical material) will be complemented with grammar, vocabulary, and exercises in an effort to expand students’ familiarization with modern Greek language and culture.


Folktales and Fairy Tales
MGRK 212b/LITR 328b/GMST 212b
Maria Kaliambou
T 2.30-4.20
The course first approaches the folktale as a genre of oral literature. Some basic concepts of folktale and fairy tale scholarship will be discussed. The folktale will be placed in the oral literary canon by discussing and challenging the academic classifications of oral narratives., analyzing topics such as performance, storytellers, and audience. In the second part, the course scrutinizes the most important theoretical approaches, such as formalism, psychoanalysis, feminism and history-sociology. For the third and last part, the course will deal with the problem of orality versus literacy, as expressed in early European folk and fairy tales from Italy and France, followed by the Brothers Grimm collections through to popular chapbooks of fairy tales.


Dionysus in Modernity: The Irrational in the Age of Reason
MGRK 216b/ CLCV 216b/HUMS 214b/LITR 226b
George Syrimis
F 1.30-3.20
The course examines the fascination with the myth of Dionysus in the modern age by focusing on questions of agency, identity and community, psychological integrity, and the modern constitution of the self. It examines the various manifestations of the Dionysiac mode in literature, anthropology, and music, and historicizes the Apollonian-Dionysiac dichotomy as a modern configuration and constitution of the tension between rationality/law and emotion/chaos, its cultural manifestations as the antithesis of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, as well as twentieth-century variations of the same themes in psychoanalysis, surrealism, and magical realism.
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