Approaches to Teaching Homer's Odyssey by Doherty, Lillian E.;

Short description:

An innovative teaching guide reinterprets an ancient epic by linking its Bronze Age roots to contemporary issues such as violence, slavery, and misogyny. It explores oral storytelling, evolving kinship, and modern cultural echoes, inviting a fresh examination of timeless narratives in diverse classrooms.

Long description:

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A guide to teaching the Odyssey through contemporary questions and approaches

Famous for its characters—the clever, unscrupulous Odysseus; the resilient, proud Penelope; and their young son, Telemachus, beginning his own life's journeys—the Odyssey is also well known as a set of fantastic tales and as a reflection of the ethos of Archaic Greece. This volume will help instructors introduce students to topics such as oral epic traditions, the relationship of the Odyssey to the Iliad, and kinship structures. It grapples directly with issues that concern instructors and students today, from the epic's value system and cultural norms to its portrayals of violence, slavery, and misogyny. Essays employ feminism, postcolonialism, and popular culture such as television, games, and comics and address a wide range of classrooms, from world literature courses to high schools and a prison. Readers will also learn about teaching responses to the Odyssey by writers from Dante to contemporary American poets.

This volume contains discussion of Dante's Inferno, Homer's Iliad, Linda Pastan's ""On Re-reading the Odyssey in Middle Age,"" and Theocritus's ""The Cyclops.""

Table of Contents:

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Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction, by Lillian E. Doherty

Part One: Materials

Classroom Texts

The Instructor's Library

Part Two: Approaches

The Odyssey and the Greek Epic Tradition

The Ends of the Odyssey, by Casey Dué

The Odyssey and Epic Traditions, by Laura M. Slatkin

The Material Culture of Epic: Teaching the Odyssey with Greek Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, by Marya Fisher

Literary and Theoretical Approaches

Appreciating a Problematic Text, by Lillian E. Doherty

Epic Simile in the Odyssey: Figures of Journey and Homecoming, by Maria Fahey

Remaking Kinship: Reading the Odyssey after the Iliad, by Bruce M. King

Gender in the Odyssey: Significance and Ideology, by Rachel H. Lesser

Polyphemus and Postcolonialism: The Island of the Cyclopes in the Odyssey, by Kirsten Lodge

Maps, Movement, and ""the Man"": Cultural Exchange and Migration in the Odyssey and Today, by Jennifer R. Ballengee

Reception

Dante's Canto of Ulysses and Reception History, by Julie Van Peteghem

Reading the Odyssey with Modern Lyric, by Sheila Murnaghan

2001 Space Odysseys: Teaching the Odyssey with Pop Culture, by Brett M. Rogers

Classroom Contexts

Navigating the Odyssey with Ninth Graders, by Patricia Vreeland

The Emerging Outline: Character Analysis and the Odyssey, by Henry Alley

Odysseus, Masculinity, and the Paradox of Domesticity, by Jamie L. Brummer

The Odyssey Project: Teaching the Odyssey to Incarcerated Students, by Michael Morgan and Olga Faccani

Notes on Contributors

Survey Respondents

Works Cited