3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course offers a comparative study of classic texts and their modern or contemporary retellings—in literature and on stage and screen—with a focus on how these ancient stories, which have endured through the ages and helped define our sense of what it means to be human, have been refashioned to reflect modern realities. Examining “second stories” provides the pleasure of seeing the familiar from a fresh and surprising perspective (e.g., the wanderings of Odysseus seen through the eyes of his stay-at-home wife, Penelope) and also allows us to study the cultural content of the tales through a bifocal lens. How does the political protest of Sophocles’ Antigone change its thrust when it is retold by a 20th-century French existentialist writing during the Nazi occupation of France? Our twice-told pairings are Homer’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad; Sophocles’ Antigone and Anouilh’s Antigone; Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Frederick Buechner’s The Storm; and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Note: This course satisfies the interdisciplinary core requirement.