Approaches to Teaching Homer's Odyssey

A guide to teaching the Odyssey through contemporary questions and approachesFamous 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."