In this course, students discuss and write about the influence and ongoing reinvention of myth in order to develop key composition and research skills. Though our focus will be on literary genres (essays as well as epic, drama, fiction, and contemporary lyric poetry), we will approach myth as a far-reaching category that intersects with such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, theology, gender studies, psychology and astronomy. Myths can be said to address the origin and nature of things, how people should act, what motivates human behavior, and what it means to be human. They define sites of ethical conflict and the revaluation of values. At the outset, we will explore contemporary thought about the nature of, relationships between, and influences of shorter foundational tales from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, the Americas, and so on. Later short works will include Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Anne Sexton’s Transformations and Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus.” We will also read longer texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis, The Bhagavad-Gita, and The Odyssey, classics that inspired other works by Dante, Milton, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Walcott, Heaney, Gluck and others. Essays by Freud, Froula, Eliot, Jung, Levi-Strauss, Darwin, Marx, Frazer, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Adrienne Rich and others will provide a theoretical basis for interpreting these works. The course also briefly addresses mythic themes in painting and other arts, and how myths continue to inform developments in contemporary thought.