Greek Mythology and Contemporary Literature: A Four Session Course

Greek Mythology and Contemporary Literature: A Four Session Course

Mondays, April 8, 15, 22 and 29 from 6 to 7:30 pm.

The old mythological stories of classical Greece have long influenced Western literature. These stories and their  characters, techniques, and ambience have continuously attracted and inspired artists and writers of the entire modern era, roughly the 500 years following 1500. In recent poetry and prose fiction, inspiration comes no less from Greek mythology than ever before. 

This course will identify some of the key myths from ancient Greece, myths that produced influential figures and lessons--early literature and early science--and we’ll discuss some of these themes as manifested in poetry and prose in English since the late 1990s. 

It would be hard to find a modern poet whose work is uninformed by the ancient Greeks, and many works of literary prose are directly tied to the myths, if only by way of subverting them, feminizing them, queering them, perverting them, anything but worshiping them, since we have learned over these past 500 years to stop short of worship--choosing instead to put our faith in an anxiety of influence, bold misreadings, and making the classics our own. We no longer worship, we play--like the wild, dangerous, heroic, godly figures that populate the mythology of ancient Greek culture.  

It is no doubt valuable to study the various tellings of Greek mythology in a straightforward, studious way, to ingest its gods and goddesses, its heroes, its schlumps, its glories and failures, ecstasies and miseries, so that we can better understand the works of our time that refer to them so prolifically. That is an education that can take a lifetime. We’ll have just a few hours together to talk and try to grasp this enormous subject. By holding up the myths to the transforming lens of the contemporary, we might be able to glimpse aspects of old Greek stories that might otherwise have gone over -- or under, or around -- our heads.

Registration is required, and class size is limited. Participants will be expected to have read at least the first two chapters  BEFORE coming to the relevant session. The readings for each session will be available at the main circulation desk on the 2nd floor.  The course takes place at Mae West room.

FIRST SESSION (April 8): A brief discussion of the creation of the universe, the birth of the Titans and Olympians, introduction to Athena, Orpheus and Eurydice, Circe, and Pyrrhus.   READING before the session: Edith Hamilton, MYTHOLOGY: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. Available at the main circulation desk.

SECOND SESSION (April 15): Reading of two very different contemporary poems: John Ashbery’s Syringa and Frederick Seidel’s Athena.   READING before the session: John Ashbery, Syringa,  Frederick Seidel, Athena. Available at the main circulation desk.

THIRD SESSION (April 22): Discussion of Madeline Miller's novel Circe that makes a fairly traditional argument for the continuing relevance of Greek myth.    READING before the session: Madeline Miller, Circe. Available at the main circulation desk.

FOURTH SESSION (April 29): Discussion of Mark Merlis’s novel An Arrow’s Flight, in which Greek myth is thrown into a contemporary milieu, subverted, distorted, reimagined.    READING before the session: Mark Merlis, An Arrow's Flight. Available at the main circulation desk.

Lecturer: Rick Whitaker is an author of Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling, The First Time I Met Frank O’Hara: Reading Gay American Writers, and An Honest Ghost, a novel made entirely from discrete sentences recycled from other books. For twenty years he has produced concerts and events at Columbia University’s Italian Academy. He founded and edited the pandemic-era literary journal now at The Exquisite Pandemic Archives. He has studied Greek mythology since he was in the ninth grade.