Humanities 2011-12 Timeline With Some Emphasis on the (loosely defined!) “Heroic”
3950 BCE
Creation (according to the Old Testament)
1194-1184 BCE? Events described in Homer’s Iliad
c. 900-800 BCE? Homer lived and recited/sang (and wrote??)
c. 429 BCE
Sophocles composed Oedipus Rex
360 BCE
Composition of Plato’s Republic (which includes the Allegory of
the Cave)
29-19 BCE
Virgil (later, Dante’s imagined guide in the underworld) wrote
Aeneid
1308-21
Dante composed the three-part Commedia, which includes Inferno;
era of Gothic cathedrals, chants, plainsongs, etc.
c. 1599-1607
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (c.1600?) and Macbeth (c.1607?)
1784
Jacques Louis David painted Oath of the Horatii
1804-08
Beethoven composed his Fifth Symphony with its famous “knocking
on the door of fate” motif
1818-19
Theodore Gericault painted Raft of the Medusa
1848-1855
1848-1874
c.1872-3
1879
1890
1879-1940
Mid-1890s
1897-98
1915
1931
1944
1947
1960s
1994
Span of time summed up in Gustave Courbet’s “realist allegory”
The Studio of the Painter
Richard Wagner wrote the words and music for The Ring of the
Nibelungen
Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise
Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House (or was that A Doll House?)
Premier of Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Macagni
lifespan of artist Paul Klee
most intense period of productivity for Norwegian artist Edvard
Munch: worked on his loose proto-expressionist “series” the Frieze
of Life
Paul Gauguin painted Where do we come from? What are we?
Where are we going? while living in Tahiti.
first publication of the story The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Fritz Lang’s first sound film, M, with a child murderer, modeled
after a couple of real-life killers, as protagonist
Appalachian Spring is created by collaborators Aaron Copland
(composer), Martha Graham (choreographer/dancer), and Isamu
Noguchi (set designer)
Arnold Schoenberg composed A Survivor from Warsaw
Scientist James Lovelock proposes the Gaian hypothesis, which
suggests that earth is a sort of complex self-regulating entity
Frank Ticheli composed Gaian Visions
Classical temperament
form
restraint
order
balance
propriety
clarity
absolute truth/objectivity
didacticism
Romantic temperament
escapism
the exotic
the individual
emotion
spirit-in-nature
the irrational
the supernatural
subjectivity
Realist temperament
objectivity
verisimilitude
the everyday
social critique
empiricism
the evidence of the senses
democratic impulse: anti-hierarchical
Place artists/composers/writers and artworks/music/literature from the course (refer to
our skeletal timeline as a starting point) on the continuum of the three temperaments:
classical/romantic/realist. Be sure to include works that were not from the three units on
those three periods (classical/romantic/realist).
As you do this, formulate some working hypotheses about the nature of heroism as
conceived within those three temperaments. Here are a few questions to help guide your
work:
-Do heroes and the heroic play different roles in the three “worlds” of those
temperaments?
-Do all three temperaments emphasize the heroic to the same degree, or does one or more
temperament fail to leave much room for the heroic?
-In what ways does examining and considering the place of heroes and the heroic help us
to understand these three temperaments?
-Do different sorts of people and/or actions tend to become “heroicized” within works
from the three different temperaments?
-What is the difference between a hero and a protagonist?
-Do the relationships between heroes and the societies to which they belong (of which
they are emblematic?) differ in some notable and illuminating way from one
temperament to another?
-Are heroes to be emulated? Admired? Envied? Pitied? Learned from? All of the above?
Do your answers differ as you consider different temperaments and works representative
of those different temperaments?
-To what degree are the two concepts, heroism and journey, necessarily bound together?
Is it possible to be a stay-at-home hero? Is it possible to travel unheroically?