ENG 203 - Reading the Odyssey

Course unit(s): 1
The story of Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from the Trojan War is one of the archetypal narratives in Western literature. This course will introduce you to Homer’s story via Robert Fagles’ modern translation and well as other variations of the Ulysses story. These will include glimpses of Odysseus in Dante’s Inferno, Tennyson’s “Ulyssesy” and “The Lotos Eaters,” Ezra Pound’s Cantos. We will read Margaret Atwood’s feminist counter-Odyssey, The Penelopiad. We will look into Emily Wilson’s recent translation, the first in English by a woman. We will also read The Oresteia of Aeschylus in Fagles’ trans. as the story of Agamemnon’s murder that revenge by his son Orestes is a tale repeated eight times in Homer’s epic, and thus the main source for Aeschylus’s plays. Finally, there is a recent novel Circe (2020) by Madeline Miller. Satisfies departmental Reading X requirement.