Weekly
Schedule Spring Quarter 2010
Please read
assigned material before each week's class meeting. Include copies of
readings in your workbook, and bring it to class for reference.
For supplementary materials, consult these course
resource links.
This schedule is subject to change in order to accommodate
intellectual curiosity.
Introduction
to the nature and study of myth.
"The
Day Pictures Were Born" and "Altered
States of Consciousness" segments from Nigel Spivey's series,
"How
Art Made the World"
Myth and
Mythography before writing: creation stories and art in the American
Southwest
Workshop (in class): mythic origins
Origin
Myth of Acoma (Sacred
Texts)
Acoma
legends (from First People)
Pueblo
Peoples of the American Southwest (from my Humanities pages)
Ancient
Observatories: Chaco Canyon (Exploratorium)
The Mythology of Star Wars
Workshop (at home): archetypes and masks
Introduction to group performance project
Project
Proposal due
Sacred
Theater and Dance
Theater
History
Popular culture and the distortion of myth
William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites: art, design, utopia, and the development of modern mythic fantasy (a study in mythographic process)
Most of Morris's works, including his prose fantasies, are avaiable at the University of Iowa's Morris Online Edition.
Workshop (in class): translating myth (the link is to the handout from this week's class, with further links to resources in .pdf)
Creating the Useful and the Beautiful (exhibit at the Huntington Library)
Terri Windling, "On the Pre-Raphaelites and Writers of Fantasy"; Elizabeth Helsinger, "Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Aesthetic and Social Experiment in the 1860s"
From William Morris, The Earthly Paradise: The Story of Cupid and Psyche and Pygmalion and the Image
Individual project completion workshop, writing clinic
Group performance rehearsals