This year, Common Ground Teaching Fellows have the option of four exciting seminars. You will be asked to rank your seminar in order of preference. Please note that while every effort will be made to place you in your first or second choice seminar, space constraints mean we cannot guarantee you your preferred options.
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Seminar 1
Memory: Homer goes to Hollywood…Again
Dr. Marina Trninic
In tears [Penelope] told the holy singer, “Stop.
please, Phemius! You know so many songs,
enchanting tales of things that gods and men
have done, the deeds the singers publicize.
Sing something else and let them drink in peace.
Stop this upsetting song that always breaks
my heart, so I can hardly bear my grief.
I miss him all the time – that man, my husband,
whose story is so famous throughout Greece.”
----Homer’s Odyssey (translation by Emily Wilson)
Poor Penelope, separated for two decades from her beloved Odysseus, simply cannot listen to Phemius’s blockbuster song again. Given her private memories of Odysseus, she experiences with unbearable sorrow what others enjoy as wine-o’clock entertainment. Worse still, her own son, Telemachus, sullenly refuses to turn the music down: “the newest song is always praised the most. So steel your heart and listen,” he retorts. Of course, unlike Penelope, Telemachus lacks private memories of his father. He relies on public memory: the songs by which bards immortalize the greatness of war heroes. Homer’s poem thus sets up a central question: which Odysseus will return home? The husband of Penelope’s private memories? Or the public memory of Odysseus recounted by Telemachus’ favorite songs? Then there is the really burning question: “Does Matt Damon have the chops to play such a complicated role?”
In anticipation of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic (and a field
trip to the movies!), this seminar will discuss the tension between private and public
memory in The Odyssey, as well as Aeschylus’s version of a story Homer repeatedly invokes as a dark mirror
to Odysseus’ return: Agamemnon’s homecoming from Troy and his murder by Clytaemnestra.
Both narratives turn on the ways their homecoming kings are remembered and forgotten
in private and in public, not just by their subjects, but more especially by their
wives and sons. How will Nolan’s filmic adaptation of The Odyssey navigate between the personal and public memories of its characters; between intimate
recollection, and the lurid spectacle of heroic violence? Or do Homer, Aeschylus,
and Nolan’s adaptation offer other lessons at this time in our history?
Texts:
Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Translated by Robert Fagles
Homer, Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson
Seminar 2
Love, Loss, and Lucidity
Dr. Janet Lawler
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time,
----T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” The Four Quartets
We’ll never know ‘til we try
To find the other side of goodbye.
----Warren Zevon, “Please Stay,” The Wind
“Enjoy every sandwich,” a gravely ill Warren Zevon famously advised David Letterman
during his last Late Show appearance before his death. His final album, The Wind, resonates with the understanding that our lives and loves, in all their simplicity
and complexity, are rendered newly miraculous by the awareness of their inevitable
end. In this seminar, we will discuss texts that bring lyrical, emotional, and visceral
insights to their exploration of the clarifying tensions between love and loss. Whether
we are coming or going, how can loss bring us closer to ourselves, each other, and
the world. Is grief the price we pay for love? Or does the finitude of our days make
love, desire, and good sandwiches all the more thing precious? We’ll think through
personal, political, and imaginative implications of such questions, guided by writers,
singers, and filmmakers anchored and adrift in loss and love.
Texts:
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (novel)
Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (novella)
Civil Wars, The Civil Wars (album)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky “White Nights” (short story)
Michael Gondry (director), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (film)
Sophocles. Antigone (play)
John Prine. The Tree of Forgiveness (album)
Warren Zevon. The Wind (album)
SEMINARS 3 AND 4 TO COME