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WiSe 19/20: PS-Surveying English Literatures: Narrating Troy II

Margitta Rouse

Kommentar

This course is entitled “Narrating Troy II” not least because there is no “single” Troy. Visitors to Hisarlik, a small village situated in modern-day Turkey, located near the remains of what might once have been ancient Troy, can see for themselves: there are so many levels to the ruins that they could have impossibly belonged to one Troy alone. Told, retold and adapted many times in different times and places, the legends surrounding the city, too, are so diverse and have become so confusingly intertwined that making sense of this confusion has become part of the Troy story itself. Not only present-day archaeologists are divided as to whether the narratives of severe military conflict sparked over, say, an exceptionally beautiful woman are helpful in trying to ascertain the “true” story of the remains that historical societies have left behind. In antiquity, the historicity of the Trojan wars – most famously told in Homers Iliad – was not disputed, but even and already then, there were a multitude of interlinking representations of events which were captured in different genres and media: not only in literature but also in plastic art and pottery. Successive generations of historians, writers, compilers, translators, poets and adaptors in various cultures and languages, among them such illustrious figures as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, have questioned, but also enriched, the picture as part of their own writing. The Troy material could perhaps best be described, in medievalist Emily Wingfield’s words, as “a tapestry weaving together different strands of the same narrative fragment” – strands that are made up of “micro-narrative histories of several generations of infamous characters such as Jason and Medea, Troilus and Criseyde, and Dido and Aeneas, characters whose stories can exist both in isolation and as parts of a larger whole”.

Whereas last semester’s course “Narrating Troy I” looked at medieval examples of how Troy inspires English literature, “Narrating Troy II” is dedicated to contemporary literature and film in English. We will study the fascinating and often conflicting ways in which Troy figures in the book-length poem Omeros, a post-colonial take on the Troy story by Nobel-prize winner Derek Walcott (published in 1990, ISBN-10: 0374523509); Pat Barker’s most recent novel The Silence of the Girls (2018, ISBN-10: 0241338093) which has been short-listed for major literary prizes; the Hollywood blockbuster Troy (2004); as well as the more recent British-American TV miniseries Troy: Fall of a City (2018) streamed on Netflix.

Please note: this course is open to all students; familiarity with last semester’s texts and discussions is not required. It is advisable to get hold of copies of the books before the semester begins.

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