Making Meaning Through Allusions
A focus that ran through my unit on The Odyssey with my freshman, was recognizing and interpreting allusions to The Odyssey in popular culture and literary sources. This provided a high-interest conduit into the text (any excuse to show Spongebob Squarepants in the classroom), but ultimately my goal was to demonstrate how widely alluded-to, canonical texts are recast and reworked to say new things in new contexts. In this sense, The Odyssey is a natural fit for paired text curricula.
The Sirens
Siren Song |
I will tell the secret to you, |
One lesson focused on exploring Margaret Atwood's reappropriation of the siren in "Siren Song" to push students toward gender analysis of The Odyssey. The line of questioning (which students discussed in table groups) employed in this slide, is informed by the second goal outlined in the above section, "A Proposed Solution:" students engage in a structured analysis of the allusion by examining the poem in terms of the epic. Students are essentially being asked to hold the classic narrative in mind as they interrogate the poet's decision to take up the perspective of a monster with seemingly no real deliberate agency in the original epic. This structured examination of Atwood's reappropriation, led to a conversation about why so many of Homer's monsters are seductive women--a cognitively complex question that led to speculation about the role of women in ancient Greek society. In this lesson, students' understanding of the original siren narrative provided an interpretive framework, which they used to make meaning by examining Atwood's deviations from the original narrative.
The Lotus Eaters
A particularly rich episode of The Odyssey for allusions was that of "The Lotus Eaters." After reading this episode for homework, I designed a lesson exploring two allusions to this episode. First, we read an excerpt from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "The Lotos-Eaters:"
Excerpt from “The Lotos-Eaters” |
I incorporated Tennyson's depiction of the Lotus Eaters because I believe he evokes the insidious nature of the island that was lost on some of my 9th graders in The Odyssey's minimally descriptive verse. After grappling with Tennyson's reimagining--languid pleasure leading to ambivalence about life and death--students engaged much more deeply with the decision faced by Odysseus and his men, leading to an impromptu debate on whether a life of passive pleasure would be desirable. |
The real "mind-blown" moment I was building toward was bridging this question of the lotus flower to our final Odyssey allusion of the day, this scene from the Coen brothers' 2000 adaptation of The Odyssey in depression-era Mississippi, O Brother, Where Art Thou?:
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Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, this lesson proved rather ambitious for a 47 minute period. We just barely got to parsing out the allusion without getting too deep into interpreting the statement the Coen brothers may have been making, equating the lotus to a baptism in this scene. This realization, however, was powerful, as a chorus of "ohs" and "woahs" filled the room as the bell rang. Scroll to the bottom to see my full plans for this lesson and post-lesson reflection. |
Conclusions and Connections
Examining intertextual allusions naturally lends itself to paired text curricula. My lessons exploring these allusions proved rigorous because interpreting reappropriations of The Odyssey naturally provided students with a shared interpretive schema (the original text), which they could then apply to the new text. This pedagogical strategy is informed by the second goal outlined in "A Proposed Solution:" establishing a shared experience in order to better structure the task of interpretation. Meaning could then be made by wrestling with the changes made in adaptation. This structured interpretation built analytical skills and led to high quality analysis, both of The Odyssey itself, and of its many allusions and adaptations.
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