Approaches to Teaching Homer’s Odyssey

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 Bronze Age Greece. This volume will help instructors introduce students to topics such as oral epic traditions, the Iliad, and kinship structures. It grapples directly with issues that concern instructors and students today, from the epic's rebarbative value system and cultural norms to its 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 interpretations of 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."