Image: Attic funerary relief, c. 340 BCE (Athens, National Museum 832).
“Tell me about a complicated man.”
Odyssey 1.1 (tr. Wilson)
This is the first line of Emily Wilson’s much-lauded 2017 translation of the Odyssey, an inarguably foundational text of world literature. As was clear to ancient audiences, the poem signals with its very first Greek word, andra (“man”), that it will revolve around a central, markedly male hero. But the poem’s characters and audience struggle to define this man, to pinpoint him in time, in space, in his performance of gender roles, and on the level of truth versus fiction. Even more fraught is any attempt to locate him on the spectrum of moral values, as Wilson suggests with her rendering of Odysseus’s epithet, polytropon, as “complicated.”
The combination of this complexity on the one hand and various archetypal qualities on the other have shaped the Odyssey and the complicated man at its center into the building blocks for countless subsequent artistic productions. The goal of the Spring 2024 Odyssey Research Lab was to investigate some of these works, with a special focus on recent novels that fill in the silences surrounding the women of the poem. These works, in the act of receiving the Odyssey, talk back to it, opening up a conversation about power, inequity, and hierarchy in societies ancient and modern. (Such novels are having a moment: they are part of a broader publishing phenomenon recently summarized in this New York Times article). The women that these novels bring to center stage have much to say about that complicated man and, importantly, about themselves, once they are allowed to speak.
The lab’s membership consisted of students enrolled in GRK 212/312 Greek Epic Poetry and a new course, CLAS 389 Collaborative Research, designed to integrate students without experience with the ancient Greek language into an upper-level research project. The nature of the lab and its topic afforded us with several ways of challenging customary power structures, through raising questions like these:
- What do we gain in the field of classics by allowing those without access to the original language an equal voice at the table?
- What happens when the instructor does not curate the course content but allows student teams to choose their own areas of investigation?
- How does it affect our understanding of literature when we treat popular novels as literary peers, not just as descendants, of the Odyssey, worthy of analysis in their own right?
Affiliation with Knox College’s Abolition for All Time Humanities Lab enabled our lab to further the College’s social justice goals through engaging publicly with a crucial humanistic questions, in this case regarding, above all, the entanglements of gender and power in literature. We are grateful to Dr. Jen Andrella and to the Abolition Lab staff, especially student lab assistant Kyra Kellogg, for sharing their expertise with us throughout this project.
Members of the Odyssey Research Lab used Microsoft Sway to present their ideas. On each of the three sites below, you can access the table of contents by clicking the outline icon in the lower right corner of the screen. Each site focuses on one of the novels selected by the lab members for investigation.
— Mitchell Parks, Associate Professor of Classics, June 2024
