I am so pleased to see my novel on a course list at Vancouver Island University this year! ENGL 273: Ancients and Moderns, or The Odyssey Today Professor Katharina Rout An eloquent storyteller who never feels constrained by the truth; a warrior who by his own admission is cowardly and unskilled in the art of war; a lone survivor with post-traumatic stress disorder; a wanderer on his archetypal journey home; a husband who longs for his wife yet gets entangled in affairs; and a man of such cunning intelligence that he dares outfox the gods—Odysseus is both a hero and a villain and amazingly alive more than three thousand years after his legendary feats. And who is Penelope—the long-suffering wife of a philandering husband or an independent woman of legendary courage and cunning? And what does the prominent role of women in The Odyssey tell us today? In this course, we will study Homer’s Odyssey as a myth and an epic in the oral tradition of ancient Greece. We will discuss its characters, themes, and structure, its encyclopaedic quality, and its status as a classic. We will then turn to modern recreations of the epic in Gareth Hinds’s graphic novel and Sam Ita’s pop-up book, and to postmodern celebration of Homer`s storytelling in Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey. We will watch the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, explore Derek Walcott`s postcolonial and Margaret Atwood`s feminist critiques, and finish the semester with a novel that locates the old story in contemporary British Columbia: Caroline Woodward`s Penny Loves Wade, Wade Loves Penny.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 04:41:11 +0000
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