We began discussion by looking at the beginnings of the three Greek and Roman epics and comparing them to Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” While Homer and Virgil called upon a muse to inspire the lyrics of their poems, and Ovid called directly upon the gods to inspire his, Whitman began his epic by situating himself […]

Blog Post Week 6 Secretaries: Lilly Loftin, Claire Williams, Brittany Rosenthal and Leah Filloy Starting with a short review of our last class we began the discussion with elements of the epic, form, and context. We considered our own epic and what form it might take, the coordinates, details of our own culture, the style […]

This week we talked about Walt Whitman, Neruda, and Gwendolyn Brooks and compared their works with the epics we read last week, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses. Whitman’s Song of Myself is situated within the newly discovered American continent, which distincts itself from the European epical tradition.  The “I” described in this text appears as a plural pronoun for […]

In our session for the graduate students, we spoke much about the tropes, characteristics, and elements of an epic. It was very interesting to point out the similarities and also the differences between the four beginning excerpts of the four epics, The Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses. We noticed that in the first three there […]

Class this week started out with a moment of clarity on the concept of “Alternative Facts”. The outside world seeps into the class discussions The Political realm is plagued with “Alternative Facts” at the moment which makes it that much more interesting that our class topics have to do with alternative facts as well! In class […]

“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from […]