The Odyssey - Online Seminar - Saturdays 1-4 pm in April

4-week online seminar course with Bruce King.
Saturdays 1:00 - 4:00 with break
4/4, 4/11, 4/18, 4/25

From the smoking ruins of Troy to the long-awaited homecoming in Ithaka, Odysseus leaves a wake of death, sorrow, and reinvention. As a hero and trickster, he slips in and out of identities—king, husband, father, son, stranger, storyteller. Wherever Odysseus goes, trouble follows, for him and those around him. And with trouble comes transformation, both of the self and of the social world.

In this four-week seminar, we’ll read the entire Odyssey closely and talk our way through its wild turns: monsters and miracles, shipwrecks and homecomings, disguises and recognitions. How is Odysseus shaped by the seductive and terrifying figures he meets during his wanderings? What do his encounters with women—divine, fantastical, mortal, and enslaved—reveal about power, desire, violence, and survival in the poem? Is the “character” of Odysseus always resistant to fixity, always defined by turns without cease?

Along the way, we’ll explore the Odyssey’s moral complexity—and one of its greatest delights: Odysseus’ intimate relationship with poetry and storytelling itself. We’ll linger over his self-narrated adventures, his “Cretan lies,” his encounter with the Sirens, and his strange kinship with the bards of Phaiakia and Ithaka. Expect spirited discussion, big questions, and plenty of moments where this ancient poem feels startlingly modern.

No Experience Required. All Welcome!

No Greek required. We’ll read everything in English translation, and everyone is welcome.

About Your Instructor

Bruce M. King's teaching and writing focusses on Homeric epic, pre-Socratic philosophy, Athenian tragedy, and comparative studies of epic and of wisdom traditions. He is completing a book entitled Akhilleus Unheroic, which explores the Iliad's dramatization of the end of the heroic and of the relationship of Akhilleus and Patroklos. He has taught at Columbia University, at the Gallatin School of Independent Study (NYU), and at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research; he has been a Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies, at the Reid Hall Center for Scholars in Paris, as well as the Blegen Fellow at Vassar College.