This course, offered yearly, always focuses on a Greek prose author. This year we will dedicate ourselves to an intensive study of Aristotle's Poetics, the foundational text of Western literary criticism and neo-classical poetics. Apart from an initial two-hour lecture to set the scene, we will focus on a close, collaborative reading of Aristotle's text in Greek. We will read about five pages of the text in Greek from week to week. For each week, we will also read some key shorter works of scholarship on different problems in Aristotle, and I will also bring along passages which illustrate the development of Greek culture's ways of reflecting on poetry and poetics up to the philosopher's time, so that we can gain some notion of the tradition from which the Poetics springs; and, if time permits, we may read some important passages from the Rhetoric and Politics as well, which help to illustrate concepts put forward in the Poetics. Students will be expected to produce a 5,000-word piece of scholarship, independently researched, on Aristotle's Poetics and/or its reception. Students may also be expected to research and present on key concepts and terms of Aristotelian theory.