>> I have heard the opinion voiced that works like the Iliad are too daunting
or too boring even for university students. I disagree. My experience teaching
the Iliad proved to me that even high school students can find the epic
engrossing. Most teenagers need help to get there, however. In this post I am
going to outline how I taught the Iliad to a gaggle of Chinese teenagers.
I grew up in Greece and we were taught the Iliad and the Odyssey at school. I
didn't find them daunting. I liked reading them both, despite being extremely
annoyed at the translation into Demotic Greek - a made-up, wooden language
that nobody has ever spoken, nor will. I also couldn't stand the way the epics
were taught, by literary "analysis" that bored every child out of their head.
But I liked the Iliad because it was basically more of the epic battles in the
songs and movies I liked at the time: I listented to a lot of epic Metal and
Connan the Barbarian was my favourite movie (with a soundtrack by Basil
Poledouris that could easily have been written for the Iliad). And I liked
the Odyssey because it was like the fantasy books I read and the games I
played: a big adventure, with many monsters encountered along the way where
the hero lost companions, rather than Hit Points, I guess.
All this came natural to me. I needed no "help to get there". I probably very
much didn't get to any place a literature professor would want me to get. I
decided that Achilles is a bloodthirsty assshole and fuck him and his μήνις,
whereas Odysseus was a smart guy, an engineer, but one with a heart who guided
him home, one of my childhood heroes [1].
But I think the ancient bards [2] would have been happy. They would have found
the literary analysis boring and preferred the spontaneous enjoyment of a
young child to a thousand eloquent analyses about the cultural value of their
epics. What cultural value does an epic have, with monsters and warriors, if
it can't get a teenager to be interested in it?
____________
[1] Together with Socrates and, er, Alexander. The Great - great butcher. What
was I thinking?
[2] Yeah, I mean the people we collectively call "Homer".
I grew up in Greece and we were taught the Iliad and the Odyssey at school. I didn't find them daunting. I liked reading them both, despite being extremely annoyed at the translation into Demotic Greek - a made-up, wooden language that nobody has ever spoken, nor will. I also couldn't stand the way the epics were taught, by literary "analysis" that bored every child out of their head.
But I liked the Iliad because it was basically more of the epic battles in the songs and movies I liked at the time: I listented to a lot of epic Metal and Connan the Barbarian was my favourite movie (with a soundtrack by Basil Poledouris that could easily have been written for the Iliad). And I liked the Odyssey because it was like the fantasy books I read and the games I played: a big adventure, with many monsters encountered along the way where the hero lost companions, rather than Hit Points, I guess.
All this came natural to me. I needed no "help to get there". I probably very much didn't get to any place a literature professor would want me to get. I decided that Achilles is a bloodthirsty assshole and fuck him and his μήνις, whereas Odysseus was a smart guy, an engineer, but one with a heart who guided him home, one of my childhood heroes [1].
But I think the ancient bards [2] would have been happy. They would have found the literary analysis boring and preferred the spontaneous enjoyment of a young child to a thousand eloquent analyses about the cultural value of their epics. What cultural value does an epic have, with monsters and warriors, if it can't get a teenager to be interested in it?
____________
[1] Together with Socrates and, er, Alexander. The Great - great butcher. What was I thinking?
[2] Yeah, I mean the people we collectively call "Homer".