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2007 Ancient Greece in the Modern College Classroom Seminar: "Homer
Across the Curriculum: The Odyssey"
July 9-13, 2007
Center for Hellenic
Studies
Washington, DC
Nomination Deadline: Friday, March 2, 2007
Directed by Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical
Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University,
and Kenneth Scott Morrell, Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Studies,
Rhodes College
Ancient Greece
Seminar Brochure and Nomination Form 
(This is a PDF file. In order to view properly, you will need Adobe Acrobat,
available for free from the Adobe
Web site.)
Homeric poetry occupies a unique position in the evolution of ancient
Mediterranean civilizations playing a formative role both in the development
of the epic and other performance and literary genres as well as artistic,
political, religious, and even economic conventions in the Greco-Roman
world. Many of these have found their way into our modern cultural contexts.
This seminar will offer an opportunity to examine the many dimensions
of the Odyssey and explore ways the poem can contribute to courses
in a variety of disciplines and inform discussions on topics as diverse
as the exchange of luxury goods to the adjudication of disputes arising
from athletic contests.
The first day will focus on an overview of the oral tradition and the
“multitext” of Homer, examining the role of an individual
singer in such a tradition, the possible ways performances became literary
artifacts, and the evolution of the various versions of the written poem
into the text we commonly use today. Our work will also situate the Homeric
epics in their cross-cultural context, by examining the relationship between
the Greek epic tradition and those of other civilizations, for example,
the Sumerians and Akkadians as reflected in the Epic of Gilgamesh
and Indic society in the Mahabharata. Our investigation of the
poem itself will range over the first four books.
The second day will begin with a brief history of the relationship between
Homeric studies and archaeological research and then feature a survey
of the archaeological evidence that currently informs our understanding
of the Bronze Age and Archaic period depicted in the Odyssey.
Our work on the poem will focus on books five through 12, during which
Odysseus relates his adventures to his Phaeacian hosts on the island of
Scheria. During this examination of the poetry we will have occasion to
discuss a variety of recent interpretative approaches.
On the third day we will continue our in-depth engagement with the Odyssey
by looking closely at books 13 through 19, which recount events beginning
with the arrival of Odysseus back in Ithaca to his encounter while disguised
as a beggar with Penelope. We will also look at responses to the Odyssey
first from the perspective of performance genres, such as lyric poetry
and tragedy, that evolved after the disappearance of the oral tradition
and then through an examination of literary epic as reflected in the works
of latter poets from antiquity such as Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, and
Ovid. Our focus will then shift to a general conversation about translation
and a comparative study of the English versions that are widely available
today, such as those by Chapman, Pope, Butler, Lattimore, Fitzgerald,
Fagles, and Lombardo.
On the fourth day we will consider the final books of the Odyssey
and look at the subsequent development of Odysseus, the returning warrior,
as a character who, in different permutations, has migrated into a surprisingly
vast array of cultural contexts. In preparation for the final day of the
seminar, when more intensive and focused work on course materials gets
underway, we will also take time to examine and discuss a variety of classroom
approaches to the poem.
This seminar is designed primarily for non-specialists. Faculty members
from all disciplines who might have occasion to use the Homeric Odyssey
in their courses are encouraged to apply. Materials for the workshop will
be available in electronic and printed formats in advance of the seminar.
Participants will be asked to read a core subset of the materials before
our work in Washington begins and then, once the seminar is underway,
to contribute their ideas, energy, experience, and skills to creating
modules for use in different academic settings.
Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature
and professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He has
served as chair of Harvard’s Literature Concentration, chair of
the Department of the Classics, president of the American Philological
Association, and, since 2000, director of the Center for Hellenic Studies.
His publications include The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the
Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, winner of the APA’s Goodwin Award
of Merit; Greek Mythology and Poetics; Pindar's Homer: The
Lyric Possession of an Epic Past; Poetry as Performance: Homer
and Beyond; Homeric Questions, Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music:
The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens; and
Homeric Responses. In the spring of 2002, Professor Nagy delivered
the Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley on “Homer
the Classic.”
Kenneth Scott Morrell is associate professor and chair of Greek and Roman
Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee and is currently the director
of outreach at the Center for Hellenic Studies. In addition to publishing
and teaching on ancient Greek and Latin literature, he
has participated in an archaeological survey in southwestern Turkey and
been active in a variety of initiatives related to the use of information
technology. He was an original member of the Perseus Project and has more
recently been involved with Sunoikisis (www.sunoikisis.org)
and the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology (CGMA) Project
(cgma.depauw.edu).
Click here
for other resources found at the Center for Hellenic Studies
website.
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