Lecture Notes for Week One.humu345.2013.rev - Lecture Notes...

Lecture Notes for Week One
How Ancient Stories Bind and Define Us
by John Freed
“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species homo sapiens--second
in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions
survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads
quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.”
Reynolds Price
“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or [Spirits], calling
them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarge and numerous senses
could perceive.
And particularly they studied the [Spirit] of each city and country placing it
under a Mental Deity until a System was formed, which some took advantage of
and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or [detach] the Mental Deities
from their objects. Thus began Priesthood; and at length they pronounced that the
Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that All Deities originally resided in the [Poet’s] Human breast.”
William Blake (1790)
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“There is no story that is not true.”
Chinua Achebe from Things Fall Apart
"We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them.
Narrative equals language equals life: To cease to narrate is to die."
John Barth, novelist and Johns Hopkins University emeritus professor

One of Michelangelo’s “Captives” (c. 1520)
And an illustration for Simone Weil’s essay on Homer (see below)
There were animals that we now call human beings (homo sapiens) about 100,000 years
ago, long before there was anything we now classify as human culture
To qualify as a part of human culture requires more than the DNA connection to our
common mitochondrial mother. It requires recognition of our common, human
expressions. To sound rather biblical, “Through their images and words shall ye know
them.”
.

Just as our DNA determines much of what we are, and can be, our culturally shared
stories and symbols contain transformative power both for us as individuals and for our
constantly evolving societies.
My approach in this course is to introduce students to some of the “high points” of
Western artistic activity to demonstrate our evolution as a human culture. This “culture
and media studies” methodology is expressed well in the catalog description:
The goal of this course is to explore the particular ways that art transforms
culture. Technologies, from ancient oral narratives through medieval cathedrals,
geographical explorations, public theatres and the printing press to the nearly
ubiquitous open access of current electronic media, will be studied as essential to
both the creation of the works themselves as well as to their transmittal over
space, time and peoples. The course historically contextualizes a number of
critically important artistic units of cultural information [epiphanies or memes] in
order to demonstrate the process of cultural evolution. The course also highlights