World Wisdom Literature
This course was available in the past and may be presented again as part of the Master of Liberal Arts curriculum.
How to live and how to lead are questions that every human community has sought to answer. The thinkers on ethics and leadership whose writings we explore in this course come from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They include the Greek philosopher Plato, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Chinese philosopher and teacher Confucius, the sages Laozi and Zhuangzi, centuries of women Buddhist teachers in Asia, the British early feminist thinker John Stuart Mill, and the authors of texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Lotus Sutra, the Mayan Popol Vuh, and writings from ancient Egypt. We will also read selected recent literature on ethics and leadership theory that takes some of these writings from around the world into account and shows how their influences are still felt today. The class is interactive and discussion-based.
- Fulfills the Elective - Non-Western requirement
- This course is a part of the Ethics and LeadershipLiterary Studies concentration
About the Professor
David Wray
David Wray is is an associate professor in the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the College. He is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge 2001), a coeditor of Seneca and the Self (Cambridge 2009), and is currently writing Ovid at the Tragic Core of Modernity. His research and teaching interests include Hellenistic and Roman poetry (especially Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius); Greek epic and tragedy; Roman philosophy; ancient and modern relations between literature and philosophy; gender; theory and practice of literary translation; and the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, from Shakespeare and Corneille to Pound and Zukofsky. He is a member of the Poetry and Poetics program.