Sing, Blog Muse, of the exhaustion of Sycorax Pine...
Sunk in preparations for tomorrow's class on a unconscionably huge chunk of the Iliad. It seems like every Monday through Thursday this semester is going to be dominated by course preparation from 8 a.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. I haven't had a moment to read for pleasure or watch even a snippet of a film. ARGH!
Luckily the Iliad just gets better and better the more time I spend with it and the understandably massive amount of literary analysis it has attracted over the thousands of years people have been reading it. Tomorrow we will probably spend not a little time discussing Helen and how sympathetically she is portrayed by comparison to the later tradition of her character. She does have a bit of a self-esteem problem for the most beautiful woman in all of history, which manifests in a tendency to refer to herself as a slut. Of course, that may just be a pity-inducing mode of flirtation. Most interesting, perhaps, is the utter disgust she shows for Paris (perhaps an echo of her own self-disgust). It remains unclear where her personal choice lies in the back story of the Trojan War. We'll see what the class thinks.
Luckily the Iliad just gets better and better the more time I spend with it and the understandably massive amount of literary analysis it has attracted over the thousands of years people have been reading it. Tomorrow we will probably spend not a little time discussing Helen and how sympathetically she is portrayed by comparison to the later tradition of her character. She does have a bit of a self-esteem problem for the most beautiful woman in all of history, which manifests in a tendency to refer to herself as a slut. Of course, that may just be a pity-inducing mode of flirtation. Most interesting, perhaps, is the utter disgust she shows for Paris (perhaps an echo of her own self-disgust). It remains unclear where her personal choice lies in the back story of the Trojan War. We'll see what the class thinks.