Minority Myth-understood: Greek Myth in American Literature
Instructor: Dr. Christina Dokou, Assistant Professor
Through a combination of theoretical approaches including Comparativism, Mythanalysis and Cultural Studies, this course aims at exploring the relations between classical Greek myth and American literature. Specifically, as this field is rather huge, it shall focus on the examination of the ways in which contemporary U.S. minorities (racial, social, financial, gender or sexual) laid claim, in their literary production, to Greek myth as allegory or metaphor in order to express their identity and demand their rights, since the direct dominant discourse channels were forbidden to them. This relationship, however, between the bedding in the cradle of Western civilization and the stepchildren of that civilization’s latest and mightiest offspring, has not necessarily been smooth or unilateral: often this appropriation of myth, whose very recognizability has threatened to turn him into a cliché, implied a sort of—strategic, maybe—capitulation of the minority self to the valorized models of its own oppressors, while even more often yet mainstream voices would protest against the “sacrilegious” transformations of the mythological material in the hands of the minorities. The result is a field of literary expression both archetypal and agonistically fresh, in which students will be called upon to: a. learn to guide themselves with the help of mythanalytic theories, b. become familiar with a number of choice works of contemporary American literature that use re-workings of myth as their creative vehicle, c. learn to discern the various categories of literary myth use and evaluate their products.
The course consists of lectures by the instructor with the aid of A/V material, constructive class dialogue, individual presentations of student work and a final research paper (approx. 5000 words, not counting footnotes and bibliography). Students will be evaluated on the basis of their participation in class (both orally and through small ad hoc written assignments), their presentation and their research paper grade. A list of the works and theories to be analyzed, as well as pdf files for most of them, has already been uploaded on the instructor’s website at http://users.uoa.gr/~cdokou/.