AFRS 209 - Homer and the Caribbean

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as GRST 209) In this class we undertake a close reading of Omeros, a modern epic poem by West Indian Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott (1930-2017). In the poem Walcott celebrates his home island of St. Lucia and the whole of the Caribbean archipelago as he simultaneously confronts 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 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 poet-Odysseus; his St. Lucian characters bear the names of figures from Greek myth— Achille, Hector, Philoctete, Helen— and Homer himself appears in the poem as a figure called “Omeros” 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 boundaries, we explore the ways that Walcott’s positioning of himself in relationship to Homer enacts his vision of a New World aesthetic. We read Omeros alongside select Homeric intertexts and come to inhabit Walcott’s Caribbean, a creolized space of infinite possibility in which he can position himself as another bard, a contemporary of Homer singing in the same song tradition while giving voice to the experience of his people and his native archipelago. Rachel Friedman.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS