Department of English

• Thursday, September 26, 2024 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: Virtual

Co-sponsored by Penn Arts & Sciences

David Wallace is currently editing a three-volume work for Oxford University Press, with 110 contributors, called National Epics. This project has an interactive website, developed in association with Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities. (To explore the site, nationalepics.com, just click on any nation that interests you.) This webinar will take a look at both the book project and a related seminar, described below, and how they aim to explore, finally, how mastery of local and national understandings helps form a global picture.

The “National Epics” course asks students to consider what imaginative text has a given nation chosen to ‘represent’ itself to the world? When was that choice made, and how well is it holding up? The choice for India has been the Mahabharata for 2000 years, but what of the United States? The class covers one nation and one text per week, beginning in western Europe (France, Spain, Ireland, England, Iceland), pivoting across Eurasia (Russia, Mongolia) and then on to India, Korea, Vietnam, China, among others. Students come to see how their own family histories, always complex, interact with and form part of national sagas.

To register, please see here:

https://www.alumni.upenn.edu/s/1587/gid2/16/interior.aspx?sid=1587&gid=2...