How does a poem become meteorically famous?  And what was life really like in a traditional European culture where people were taught to value the past? 

This class looks for answers by tracing the afterlife of Homer's Iliad, one of the first poems in Western Europe and already a schoolbook for the rest of the ancient Greeks.  Unlike the more famous Odyssey, this sometimes repetitive story of war can be hard for us to like.  Yet generations of readers were told that it was great, and their encounters with it are precisely what we want to study.  It seems clear that in each case they asked:  what meaning does Homer have for the modern world? 

This is especially remarkable because people from such diverse times and places found Homer relatable or relevant.  As the reading list below shows, we start with the Iliad itself, then study later Greece, medieval England, Scotland and Germany in the 18th century, and North America in the 20th century, finishing with Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club (1996).