Greek Myth Retold

While Greek Mythology has never truly left the cultural zeitgeist, it’s clear that lately these old stories are at the forefront of the contemporary imagination. Over the past several years, no less than hundreds of retellings of Greek myths have been released in cinematic, best-selling novels, inventive scholarly works, and piles of poetry. What is compelling us to fervently consume these symbolically rich but often fraught tales of gods and goddesses, monsters and oracles, full of brutality, rebirth and transcendence?

In this seminar we’ll read three works that explore this question while updating the stories with poetic insight and contemporary flair: Madeline Miller’s Circe, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. These books retell these myths through feminist and queer lenses while bringing the characters and their worlds to life in vivid technicolor. We’ll discuss the transformative and tragic quality of these stories, the recovery of the feminine voice out of patriarchal mores, and why these tales, which remain alluring after thousands of years, might still have something vital to say about what it means to be human.