Watch Lecture (30 min video)

Delivered 08/26/20

Welcome to World and British Literature

Welcome to World and British Literature. It’s been a while, I have to admit, since I’ve been in the classroom. And that may make you laugh, but that’s okay, it’s true. It’s been a little while.

I have done a few other things since then. What I wanted to do, though, I’ve got to be honest, though, I am excited about this class. I love literature, and I’ve gone through and I’ve kind of chosen my favorite books kind of throughout all the literature, and that’s what we’ll be reading.

So things like The Odyssey or Heart of Darkness or actually like Pride and Prejudice. I have to admit, I have never read all of Pride and Prejudice before this class. I know it’s tragic. I’ve seen the stories. I’ve done all this. It’s totally and completely wrong. Some of the books I have not read.

Class Preparation and College Prep Approach

What I want to do for you all is make sure that you are getting these books before you graduate from high school. And I think it’s important to realize this is a college prep class. And I’m going to approach it like I did literature when I was at Vanderbilt.

Oh, and I guess I should probably start my story here. I went to Vanderbilt many moons ago and studied English. I was actually a creative writing major at Vanderbilt. And that, I think, I believe this is the side of the English building.

We had classes in there. I met with my advisor. Oh, actually, we didn’t have as many classes in here. but all the advisors are there. And it sits right in the middle of campus, and it’s very pretty.

And you would go in, and you would meet with your professors, and you would talk through stuff. And there is the Shakespeare professor, who I really loved. My professor, one of my advisors, his area was, he loved the Victorians.

Specialization and Critical Analysis in Literature

And he was really a great scholar and the Victorian poets. All this to say is usually people specialize. And when you get to college, you specialize more. But what you’re getting is you’re often getting criticism.

not just read the book, but you read what other people are saying about the book. And this is actually one of the things we’re going to be doing here, is trying to introduce you to the idea of reading something, analyzing it, and also understanding it, what others are saying.

And this is what I did there, but I was there for four years and studied English. Then I left, and I was in the Navy for a while. So I’ve had four years in the Navy, kind of on my wanderings like Odysseus.

I spent a while in France, two years, and that’s where the last place I’ve been teaching in a classroom. I had two years in a school there where I taught things like literature. I had modern literature at that point, 20th century literature, and history, and philosophy, and Bible, and film.

Multidisciplinary Background and Teaching Experience

So a lot of what I’ll try to bring into this class are other areas, but I would be considered kind of a multidisciplinary person. I like lots and lots of types of education and lots and lots of learning, and I just kind of put it all together.

My hope, though, is that this is kind of an enjoyable class in terms of the literature. You’re going to do a lot of reading. You may have realized it already by looking at the book list.

However, my hope is we will not tear these books apart and have them die, but rather you’re going to kind of look inside them as kind of living things and say, oh, this is quite interesting what the author is doing.

And I hope by the time you leave, you will understand far more about literature and good literature before you started. I mean, let’s be honest. If I said nothing, you just read all these books, we’d still be way ahead. They’re very good books.

Personal Life and Film Work

Okay. I then, after leaving France, came back. I had children. I married a lovely lady named Maggie who has red hair and gave my children red hair. Except for one.

And ended up starting and doing a film series a number of years ago called Modern Parable. That’s what got me into the world of film. And I wrote and produced and directed all of those films.

And then more recently I did a documentary on Genesis that I wrote and produced. So I have interest in science as well. And so anyway, that’s just, I have not been in the classroom, but have always been in education in some form or other.

Central Theme of the Course

Now, we have a theme in this class, for the whole class. I’ve tried to choose our books to kind of explore this theme. And the theme is man’s struggle through life to achieve his purpose and destiny.

Now, I put man there, and I’m terribly politically incorrect. This is the old way of doing it. When I went to Vanderbilt, feminism was really kind of pushing, and you’d have to write H slash, I think it was S slash H-E, Shahi, for both. Or he or she.

And they had all these very interesting ways of trying to get around what had been used forever, which is just man, because it meant man as in human. It was easier for man and woman, just call it man.

So, man struggle, men and women, because after all, we’re looking at Miss Elizabeth Bennett. And Miss Elizabeth Bennett has a lot of struggles, does she not? Oh, yes, she does.

Application of the Theme to Literature

And is it her struggle through life to achieve her purpose and destiny? It is. So you realize this applies to men and women in good literature. That’s our theme.

Now, the reason I have a picture of this is those were the boats that I drove when I was in the Navy for two years working with Naval Special Warfare. That is a rigid hull inflatable boat. That is a rubber sponson, and it’s a fiberglass hull.

The reason this is important, it’s about 30 feet long, so you can kind of get the picture. Those are people back there standing. We would carry seals in there.

I bring this story up is to say that literature and life are related. So one night we were working in a river area, which we should not have been working in. These are marine boats.

They should never be in a riverine environment because riverine environments will suddenly get very shallow very quick. You also have a flat bottom boat working in riverine because of this very thing.

Personal Anecdote on Struggle

If you get off the path, you can get stuck in mud. And unfortunately, one of my guys drove off the path. We all got stuck in mud. And so we had to pick someone up like at two or three o’clock in the morning.

And so we’re desperately trying to get this big boat, which would not go backwards because, see, it suddenly gets just drops off. And so it would dig in. So you had to go forward.

So in the middle of the night, I’m standing up to water right here with a rope on me standing in the front as the boat is way above me because it’s sort of floating, sort of stuck in the mud.

And I have about five or six SEALs. well, actually, these are the special combat crewmen and a bunch of Marines that were recon pushing the boat as I am walking this way and walking that way, trying to find where it gets deeper.

And so I was basically the guide and they were pushing. And we did this for an hour or two. And I remember looking up at the stars and thinking, God, how did I get here? And how do I get out?

So, and the only way out was through struggle and walking in mud for an hour or two at a time. And this is the thing about life. You will struggle in your life.

There are going to be struggles. I don’t know if you had many struggles. I would hope that I could say you weren’t going to have many struggles. But I know that if you are a human living on God’s earth, that unsadly is fallen.

Purpose and Destiny in Struggles

You will struggle, which is why this idea to achieve purpose and destiny. I mean, I could easily say, yes, your purpose and destiny is to know the Lord and to be saved. And that’s all very true.

But how you get there, I mean, look at Paul. He went through a lot of struggle. And this is basically the story of life. Christian or non-Christian, and really as we as Christians, it’s only the only, you really have the ultimate hope, is through struggling and through Jesus Christ, but it doesn’t mean you won’t struggle.

And Christians are actually some of the stories of some of the craziest struggles that have been out there. So with that said, that’s our theme.

I would like to quote myself. I don’t always quote myself, but I am here. No one writes a great work of literature for an English class. That I can promise you.

Fitzgerald did not sit down and write The Great Gatsby and say, I am so excited how all these English classes for the next hundred years are going to be reading this book. He did not think this.

In fact, he might have been kind of bothered if he knew they were doing this. He wanted people to read it and like it. Homer did not write the Odyssey for an English class.

Purpose of Literature and Author Intent

I know that, especially because he spoke in Greek, but he didn’t write it for a Greek class. So many of you get books and you’re like, oh, I’ve got this book and I’ve got to, you know, read it and I hate it. And I can’t believe I’m making us read this.

That’s okay. It wasn’t never intended for you to read in that format. Meaning this is a very, it’s like paintings in a museum. They really aren’t designed to be in a museum completely.

I mean, yes, they want to display them, but they’re just going to be in houses. And that’s often how paintings were intended, is to live in and enjoy it. In the same way a book, if you read books and you enjoy books, they’re for your enjoyment.

They’re for you to communicate with, to, in some ways, to talk with the author, to let him give you enjoyment, to let her guide you on a story. That’s why it’s written.

So what we’re going to do, though, is try to get a better handle on what the author’s doing so that you will enjoy it better. So ultimately, the goal of this class is to increase your enjoyment.

Expanding Literary Palate

And also, let’s be honest, there are a lot of foods out there most people don’t know about. So I lived in France for a number of years. There are many very interesting foods.

I had never had snails before. Escargot is very good. But it’s usually done in butter, and you have to have parsley, and it’s done in a special way.

And it’s cooked with a certain wine. You have a certain wine added into it. It’s really good. I had never had this before. But my palette was expanded.

And so I hope to expand your palettes with things you are that I would never have thought that I would have liked this book. Oh, but I do. I never thought I would have appreciated Dante. Oh, but I do.

A little preview of coming attractions. We are beginning with Homer. And not Homer Simpson. Homer, we think, lived during the 700s BC.

Overview of Course Books

And he was writing actually about stories and things that had actually been going on much, much before. But 700 BC puts him a long, long time ago. Writing actually about the same time as Isaiah would have been writing.

Very interesting when you start putting some of these guys together. Now, they’re not exactly when he wrote. People say he was blind, maybe. That’s because they find the bards in his story are often blind.

But that’s just that no one knows. They know very little about him. Other than that, he was a great writer because of what the unity, even though Iliad and Odyssey, his two great epic poems, are different.

The question at the same time is that they are very related. And most people will go to say, yeah, the same guy had his hand in both. That’s where we begin.

And in many cases, it’s the beginning of Western literature, period. The first great stories. We will then go jump, look at that, we’re already in AD, to Augustine of Hippo.

Now this actually is a very interesting picture. It is off a sarcophagus from Egypt from the same period of a Roman. And so this is very much what he could have looked like.

Meaning Augustine was lived in Africa. He was a North African at that point, a Roman North African. And he basically is the story, his book he wrote, which is The Confessions, is considered one of the greatest works of literature and is considered probably the greatest work of Christian literature ever.

Everyone needs to be reading this if you’re a Christian. And it’s basically his story of his conversion. I think I remember a friend of mine who I debated with at Vanderbilt.

Personal Story of Conversion Through Confessions

And I took a class, and he was quite brilliant. He was a pre-med, and we debated together in the pre-med. I had to take chemistry, which was really hard.

Actually, I think it was physics. I had to take physics and chemistry, and it had been Naval ROTC, even though I was an English major. And I would study with this guy.

And I would be at the bottom of the curve, and he was always at the top. And he would always go, oh, yeah, you didn’t do as well. let’s study a little more.

And then he would do better and I would not really do as well. So it turned out, I was like running a marathon with a guy that runs all the time and you’d never run.

And I was always just struggling to keep up. Well, it turned out that he graduated salutatorian, number two at Vanderbilt when he graduated. He was a smart cookie.

However, what’s interesting is he read the confessions and was converted by it. So he was not a Christian, had picked a copy up and read it and was like, this is incredible.

The translation we’re using is new. It’s interesting. I really like it. I think it’s more immediate. A lot of these books are going to take some getting used to, but I’m going to hope you enjoy Augustine’s Confessions.

It’s the story of his life, basically. We will then jump again to what is considered the greatest Christian epic. Well, it’s a good question. We’ll debate that because we’re having two Christian epics.

So we’re having two pagan epics that are Homer’s, of which we’re reading the Odyssey. We’re jumping the Aeneid, which was Virgil’s Roman epic in Latin.

Dante wrote his divine comedy, the Divina Comedia, which is basically his story of going down to hell, coming up through purgatory, and then going from purgatory all the way up to heaven and the paradise vision.

It’s all the people he meets in all these places. So he goes through all of history, And you will meet many people that you’ve seen in the Odyssey in hell or purgatory or paradise.

Course Structure and Readings

And you’re going to get a wonderful picture of the medieval view of the world, its worldview. And it is a comprehensive. It’s in like literally three books. It’s in Tercerima.

And Tercerima is rhyming three. And so it’s in stanzas A, B, A, B, C, B, C, D, C. See how it works? And so you’re picking up.

And Italian’s better at this. We’re going to be doing a translation from Dorothy Sayers, one of my favorite great, both a writer, she was a mystery writer, and a great translator.

An amazing scholar from England from the 30s and 40s and friends with Tolkien. And, you know, Lewis knew that crowd, a Christian. Her translation is considered one of the most attempts to be accurate with rhyme.

I hope you enjoy it. It’s an interesting approach. But as you notice, a lot of these are older stuff. We will all of a sudden get into things that are more normal stories that you actually may know.

And this is the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And this is more of a knight’s tale. And this is where the action stories begin to begin.

I shouldn’t say that. You’re going to have a lot of action in the Odyssey. But this is where you’re going to get to kind of have a familiarity with Arthur and King Arthur.

This is a short piece. It’s a really good translation that I like. A lady translated out of England. Just a fantastic translation that I think you’ll enjoy.

Eventually we’ll make it to Bill Shakespeare. So Bill, you know, popular, great, genius. I mean, he really is. He and Homer, it’s hard to find out.

You know, in the English-speaking world, he is our Homer. No one greater. And I think his best, well, my favorite of his plays is Hamlet, which is the story of a young man’s struggle to basically avenge his father’s death.

We will explore that. That’s what we’ll read. And you could go on and we could have a whole class on Hamlet, reading a different play for 30 weeks. That’s impressive. But we’ll only do one here.

Later Readings and Writing Assignments

We will eventually make it to the second great Christian epic. And the greatest Christian epic written in English, that’s John Milton. John Milton was blind when he wrote this.

So he was the blind poet. And he would recite the poem he had written in his head. And his daughter would write it down. So Paradise Lost is what we will do with John Milton.

And his play is fascinating once you have read some of the Greeks and you know some of the history, what he’s doing. They all are aware, as T.S. Eliot said, that they stand in the stream of history and you have to always know what’s gone before.

Does that make sense? It’s like everything’s gone before. I’m standing at this point and everything that’s gone before is, in a sense, building up in where I am.

And John Milton, these are genius men. We will not read all of this. just as we will not read all of Dante, but you will read enough to enjoy it and be introduced to all the characters.

Of course, we then go to Miss Austen, Jane Austen and her Pride and Prejudice, which I think is possibly considered her best novel in terms of just the genius structure.

She was like Mozart. She was like Constable. Some of these paintings and painters and poets, And she would be writing around the time of the 1790s to the 18-teens.

Her stuff is the most perfect stuff we will read. And let’s be honest, Jane Austen, we will read her letters, and we begin to move into the critical materials where we start to look at the secondary materials that associate with this.

She wrote all these letters to friends, and when you read her letters, it feels like you’re reading her novels. And you begin to realize that she viewed the world this way, And in a real interesting sense, she puts herself into this novel.

And that’s one of the genius things about Jane Austen. She, like Mozart, you never grow tired of listening to her or reading her. We have to have a Charles Dickens.

Whether you like Dickens or not, he’s loved, he’s hated. You have to admit, he’s incredibly important. We will be reading A Tale of Two Cities, which also is his historical fiction, which brings us into basically the French Revolution.

and discussing this and the issues between these, basically, the two cities of London and Paris, and what are the two tales and how do they interact, and very interesting questions about politics and policies and philosophies.

All of it comes out. It’s one of his more accessible novels. I think you’ll enjoy it. But what is good about Dickens is some of his writing is on the nose.

He’s not a hard writer. And you can begin to see symbolism, begin to see what he’s very intentionally wanting us to do. Some people will say, well, I’m seeing this symbolically in this piece.

It may or may not have been the author’s intent. Oh, you always know it, Dickens. It’s his intent. And that’s good and helpful to us.

We next will go to one of my favorite books. And it’s a dark book. Joseph Conrad was not writing in his original language in English. He was Polish.

He came and got involved with seafaring, got involved on a steamer, spent time in Africa and the ivory trade and wrote the book Heart of Darkness. Almost all of his books, Lord Jim, other of his books have to do with seafaring and things like that.

The book itself is a novella. It’s actually quite short. And it’s the story of Marlow going down looking for a man named Kurtz, who crazy things have happened with in the Congo.

But it is also from a historical perspective, a very dark snapshot of what was going on with Belgium in the ivory trade, slavery, issues of black and white.

And by that point, you’re seeing ideas of color are very pronounced. So the racial issues you realize are not new. And how does he explore them? How does he explore good and evil in playing up on the idea of black and white?

So that in many ways is a book that gets very complex and enables us to explore an author doing all sorts of very interesting things. Not long, but it will take a lot of thinking.

Final Readings and Southern Literature

Finally, we will end with a 20th century book, which I think is one of the greatest 20th century novels. But it’s a Southern author, Robert Penn Warren, and we’ve returned back to Vanderbilt.

So Robert Penn Warren was one of the fugitives. I did my honors thesis at Vanderbilt. It was a screenplay on the fugitives, and it had Robert Penn Warren in my screenplay.

So as an author, he was a poet. He was a novelist. And I was told by one of his friends, Andrew Lytle, that when he kind of annoyed Andrew, Because Andrew was 92 when I got to know him, and I was 22.

And he let me spend a week with him. And Andrew Lytle was one of the great southern, was one of the agrarians with Robert Penn Warren, one of the last to live.

He said, “You know, the problem is he didn’t seem to do any rewrites.” And that’s a very interesting thing. Because most writers are rewriting, and you see all the drafts they’re doing on stuff.

Apparently, he would write it in many cases, and just, it was all ready to go. Now, I don’t know if that’s totally true or not, because it looks like, you know, maybe he’s rewriting here, but maybe he’s just signing it at that point.

I don’t think he’s actually signing a book of this thing. He’s pretty much a crazy genius. And his poetry and his novels are both great.

All the King’s Men has been made into movies twice. And that’s what we’ll be reading. Coming from, of course, the Humpty Dumpty story. It’s a book about politics.

It’s a book about scandal. It’s a book about, really about the American South in some way, set in Louisiana. It’s a very interesting, rich novel.

And I think you’ll enjoy it. But I also think it will explore a lot of things. and it will teach you how to bring this up from a writing perspective.

You will be rewriting, and I’ll discuss that in a second. We will also be talking about poets. Does anyone know who this is? This is my favorite poet, romantic poet, and I don’t really like the romantic poets.

This is John Keats, young John Keats who died at a very young age from sickness, but also one of the great geniuses. I will sprinkle poets in that you just need to know.

Writing Assignments and Tutorial Method

And, of course, we will talk do writing. The way we’re going to do writing in this class is a little different, and I use this term learning to listen, is that what you’re going to do is you’re going to, after certain of our books, you will write a two-page paper.

No more. You will stand up here in class and you will read it to us and we will all discuss it. It’s a little more of the tutorial method that I worked out when I was studying in Oxford for a short period.

It’s very effective at teaching you how to write because the best way to learn to write is to listen to your own words. If you write a paper and read it out loud, and when I did this at Vanderbilt, I used to write papers and I would read them out loud to myself.

Not read them into my, you know, you actually, I was speaking, when you hear your own words, you will catch your problems a lot faster because you have an ear for good writing.

You’re all readers. You’re all well-educated. You will catch your own problems. And that’s what we’ll do here in this class. It could be a little concerning, but that’s okay. You’ll be fine.

Introduction to Homer and His World

Questions about this. I’m going to give you a quick introduction to the world of Homer, and then you can go off and finish reading the Odyssey.

Homer in the world of the Odyssey, that is one of the ships. These are basically from vases that came probably about two or three hundred years after Homer, but this is the idea to see all the guys sitting in the oars, and that’s the mast right here, and there’s the sail.

So very similar to what they think Odysseus would have had. What’s interesting is for so many years, everyone believed Troy was made up. Oh, it’s a made-up story.

And during the rationalist period in the Enlightenment, oh, they knew Troy was not real. Oh, that’s just a story, a myth. You know, this guy Heinrich Schliemann, the 19th century, he’s like, I’ve read these. I think it could have been real.

And he’d heard these stories from a place called Hisserlich in Turkey. So he went and started digging. He dug, and he dug, and he found Troy. A real place.

All the different layers of it. It had already been destroyed and built back and destroyed. And at one point, he found the treasure, which he had called very appropriately Priam’s treasure.

This is his wife Sophia, his second wife, and that’s all real gold. It’s still today. You can see it in his museum in Russia. An amazing treasure trove of things, of old spears and bowls.

That’s Shleeman himself. And everyone was like, wow, that’s really impressive. But, you know, that’s just one place. I mean, Mycenae, where the Greeks were supposedly out of, Agamemnon’s home.

Surely that wasn’t. No, no, no, that can’t be real. He was like, oh, no, I’m going to prove that one to you too. So he went and found Mycenae, digging where he thought it was.

And this is a very interesting point. Many people today discount old books. Oh, they’re all stories. They’re all made up. And that’s very dangerous because over and over again, we’ve seen that there’s actually a lot of times there’s true to this.

Archaeological Discoveries Confirming Homer

And Mycenae, they actually found it. See the people? It was a big civilization. And he also found gold. This, named after the famous king of Mycenae from the Iliad, Agamemnon.

Now, it probably wasn’t Agamemnon, but he called it Agamemnon’s mask. Look at the gold that was found there, the architecture. And what you realize is a very advanced civilization living in from about the 1600s to about the 1100s.

And what’s interesting about it, they had, this would have been swords. You don’t have spears and stuff. even though they remade these spheres and all and things like that, the wood would have disintegrated.

But look, Bronze Age, very interesting. And this is the key how we know that Homer wasn’t writing about his own time, is you will see him talking about bronze.

By the time Homer was living, it was iron. But back when Mycenae was around and the Trojans, it was bronze. And what you begin to realize is Homer is looking back on something that happened a long time before.

Many years had passed. There had been a Greek dark age where writing had gone away and it had stayed as a result of oral poetry. This was their empire.

All the pink were the Greeks, the Achaeans, and then you see Troy. Crossing the ocean and all this, it all of a sudden begins to make sense. Real places, all of these dots are Mycenaean civilizations and palaces are the ones that are square.

So they were big. And it goes all the way down to Crete, which you can’t see here. But the question we have to ask is who was Homer? This is kind of the classic picture, the idyllic picture.

There he is, the blind poet playing on the wire. Not unlike the character from the Odyssey that you’ll be introduced to with the Faikans that basically are, he’s there telling stories.

People often say, “Ah, Homer put himself in there.” Well maybe. Clearly Homer was a poet like this. Was he blind? We don’t know. But what we do know is that Homer wrote in something called dactylic hexameter.

Poetic Form and Translations

And what I mean by this is like, if you see your, it’s called a feet, hexameter is six. And so over the sea past Crete on the, that’s three, Syrian shore to the southward.

And it doesn’t quite work in English in the same way. You can see these are beached, dwells in the well-tilled lowland, a dark-haired Ethiopian people.

The translation you’re doing by a guy named Richard Lattimore is probably one of the greatest translations, trying to maintain as much of the feel of the dactylic hexameter as the original.

This is the original. Andromoi, and excuse my Greek, it’s just not that great. Andromoi enepe musa polutopropan osmala pola. The famous, you know, tell me muse of the man of many ways.

And then, of course, this is what the Greek would have looked like. You know, this is a much more recent version of it. The old Greek was much older.

The point is that this is a translation you’re reading. And as you notice, this is a much more of a sing-song language than English is. English, it’s really kind of just a rough-and-tumble Germanic language.

It’s not great. I mean, we love to sing it, but Italian, all the Romance languages, Greek, way better for singing and for telling stories, far more rhyming potential.

But that is said, know that what you’re reading is a poem, and so I’ve tried to get a version that will recreate it as well as possible.

Visual Depictions from Ancient Art

Let’s go through and look at just a few quick images of the Odyssey. What is this? What is this from? Circe. You see, there is the pig head, the donkey head, and there’s Odysseus.

And oh, look, he’s got his sword out, and there’s Circe. You see how this is done through terracotta vases. They would paint them black, and they would go back and etch out this part to make it.

So these beautiful vases, these are, again, from the 4th, 5th, 6th centuries B.C. These are very old. You can find them in museums. The British Museum has them.

You can usually find them in New York City. They’re really worth studying because the detail is incredible. Here we go. What is this? The sirens, right?

We have our Cyclops. They’ve actually found this. Then, of course, you see him blinding Polyphemus. So this idea that these were stories they all knew.

We have Penelope sitting there. I think it was Telemachus. This is an example not of the armor that probably would have been there in the real war, but of the armor that may have been around during the time that they were making this vase.

And that’s one of the things that though it was closer, they were closer to Homer and Homer was closer to that time. It was still much, much older than that.

Again, we have another ship down here. And we end here with this very interesting painting done in France by a guy named Ingres, who’s a neoclassicist.

Homer’s Enduring Legacy

And what you see is Homer is being crowned. This is called the apotheosis or the divine, the making of the gods, making Homer a god or announcing him a god.

Down below you have the Iliad and the Odyssey, his two points, his two great epics. But then what’s interesting is you have all these different people, but look, well, that’s an older guy.

It may have fitted his time, but that guy looks much more recent. Oh, look at this guy. These guys are from France. You know, if you can see what it is, is it shows that Homer is really considered the greatest of all the writers and the artists.

and they’re all paying him homage. Pindar, but look here, I think that’s Raphael. Okay, look, there’s Bill Shakespeare down at the bottom. You know, you have guys like, I think this is Moliere, holding his mask.

And if you kind of go around, you can pick through who the different characters are. As you can see, he’s a neoclassicist, so he thinks the classical period was greater than the modern.

And that’s what Ingress, the author, is. But nonetheless, the question is, why is Homer considered the greatest? He’s still considered the greatest. This is nearly 200 years ago.

That was 2,500 years after Homer was writing. Pretty impressive. This one guy is considered still the greatest of all the poets and writers in the Western world.

And he’s one of the first. That is what I want you to begin to think as you finish the Odyssey this week. And we talk about it next week.

And we’ll go through and do a whole exploration of the Odyssey. What’s the structure of it? How is Homer doing what he’s doing? Why is it important? and then we’ll go into our first writing assignment.

Any questions? Go forth and prosper.