CLASS 6801

Homer and Global Modernity

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2020-2021.

This course examines how Homer's epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad, have been read in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Homer has long been understood as important for defining and contesting European modernity (as a 'classic' or as 'universal'). We will be investigating what happens to Homer when writers and translators, such as Tariq Ali, CLR James, and Derek Walcott write back to Eurocentric ideas of modernity. Therefore we will trace the receptions in various media (popular film, critical theory, the novels of Toni Morrison) to understand how Homer articulates the concepts and crises of contemporary global culture.

When Offered Fall.

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