After Troy: The Odyssey

The Odyssey is among the oldest works of literature in the Western tradition. Composed during the Archaic period of ancient Greece, it tells the fantastic stories of the hero Odysseus on his decade-long journey home across the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy, which include his adventures with the gods, man-eating giants and beguiling witches, as well as his coldly executed revenge against the suitors of his wife Penelope. It is a poem of trickery and survival. Both Odysseus and Penelope act through disguise and deferral in a world where visible agency is denied them, for very different reasons and with very different outcomes. What are the ethical, political and aesthetic stakes of reading an ancient text across such a vast distance of time and culture? Although the epic’s original audience and performers lived in a world radically different from our own, the poem continues to provoke urgent reflection on responsibility, belonging, and what it means to live a meaningful life. We will explore these questions and others bearing on truth, lies, and representation; slavery and freedom; recognition and belonging; life, death, and memory.

In this seminar, we will read the Odyssey in its entirety, attending closely to what the poem demands of its readers as well as what it has historically been made to mean. What is the relationship between heroism and violence, cunning and kleos (honor and reputation)? How does the poem construct and trouble categories of human and divine, free and enslaved, home and elsewhere? The Odyssey is a poem abounding in hierarchies of power—in the political machinations of the gods who toy with mortal lives, in rigid domestic roles. We will use practical questions about the plot of the poem, such as ‘Does Penelope recognize Odysseus when is disguised as a beggar?’ or ‘Why does Odysseus entreat queen Arete for help instead of king Alcinous?’, to springboard into questions of power, identity and language.

Our primary text will be Emily Wilson’s verse translation. Because we will also interrogate the process and politics of translating ancient epic poetry, we will supplement Wilson with short selections from earlier translations. While the majority of the seminar will be devoted to a close reading of the poem itself, we will set it in dialogue with oral poetic traditions from other cultures in order to situate the Odyssey within a broader history of performed verse and to understand the basics of the debate of what scholars call “The Homeric question”: the when, where, how and why the poem was written down even as it was an expression of an oral tradition. A foundational text for world literature, the Odyssey has inspired writers ancient, modern and contemporary, from Virgil to James Joyce, from Constantine Cavafy to Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood. Readers of all levels benefit from returning to this text to ask new questions and seek new connections.