GRST 185 - Homer in the Caribbean

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)

(Same as AFRS 185) In this six-week course we undertake a close reading of Omeros, a modern epic poem by West Indian Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott (1930-2017). In the poem Walcott both celebrates his home island of St. Lucia and the whole of the Caribbean archipelago while also confronting the histories of colonialism and slavery that shaped it. While utterly Caribbean in setting, scope and theme, the poem is positioned in close conversation with Homer and the Homeric poems, and represents, by many accounts, the most important work of Homeric reception in English since Joyce’s Ulysses. Walcott’s alter-ego in the poem is a wandering Odysseus; his St Lucian characters bear the names of figures from Greek myth— Achille, Hector, Philoctete, Helen— and Homer himself, whom Walcott calls “Omeros,” is a character in the poem who washes up on the St. Lucian shore. As we navigate the poem’s complicated narrative trajectories and follow them back and forth across temporal and spatial borders we come to inhabit Walcott’s Caribbean–a creolized space of infinite possibility— and to understand the ways in which his positioning of himself in relationship to Homer enacts his vision of a New World aesthetic. Rachel Friedman.

Second six-week course.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS