SECTION 112 Thursday 10-11 242 Dwinelle
myst 3 cSECTION 113 Thursday 11-12 175 Barrows
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Dear Mythologists,
The odyssey continues!
Here are the themes and questions which I think will prove profitable to address while pondering the remainder of Homer’s Odyssey for our next section meeting.
The guidelines for the writing assignment remain the same as last time’s (including the reminder to include the relevant page numbers, and underline the relevant passages).
You’ll be happy to know that most of you did quite well on the first assignment. Keep up the good work!
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For our next section meeting (Thursday, February 12), please read the remainder of Homer’s Odyssey and address the following questions:
1) As Professor Bulloch mentioned in lecture, the suitors are one group who display their uncouth nature by flagrantly breaching the codes of xenia (generally translated as ‘hospitality’). What other figure or figures encountered by Odysseus show their uncivilized and barbaric nature by ignoring or violating the codes of xenia?
2) What is the nature of existence like in Hades? What consciousness do the shades of the dead seem to have? What do they need in order to gain/regain it? Given Homer’s account, would you say that the ancient Greeks had a concept of a personal afterlife? (Please devote at least a few paragraphs to this issue.)
3a.) We have already seen that Helen provides Menelaos with a drug of benumbment or forgetfulness (p. 71). Where else in the Odyssey do we encounter the theme of forgetfulness?
3b.) Similarly, we saw in Odysseus’s rejection of Kalypso a rejection of the seduction of insular benumbment. What are some other examples in which Odysseus rejects the temptation to ‘zone out’ of the world and forget about the way home, and instead actively pursues experience and knowledge?
Please pay attention to the story of the affair between Aphrodite and Ares, Hephaistos’s net to trap them, and the responses of Apollo, Hermes, and Poseidon. (Nothing to answer here.)
Please pay attention to the episode of the foot-washing nurse, Odysseus’s scar, and his youthful boar-hunt. (Nothing to answer here.)
4) How does Odysseus finally convince Penelope that he is indeed her returned husband?
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