Thread by @sentantiq

#ReadingHomer A thread

Over the past few weeks there has been a bit of a frenzy over Oxford University’s potential move to drop Homer and Vergil from their required curriculum for Classics

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#ReadingHomer

There have been the predictable O Tempora, O Mores articles lamenting the fall of education and 'the decline of the west'.

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This news even made The Blaze!, quoting only a student who calls it “a fatal mistake” because “Homer has been the foundation of the classical tradition since antiquity.”

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And this has been, perhaps unfairly characterized as part of a “diversity drive” with the adjective there used as a dogwhistle for cultural supremacists and not a sign of progressive, inclusive intent

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You know what I haven’t heard much of? People defending this proposal. Well, here I am, and that’s what I am going to do

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I am a Homerist. I have spent more than half my life reading, teaching, and writing on Homer. To say that I love the Homeric epics is such an understatement that it breaks my basic constative ability.

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But this proposal makes sense. Let me tell you why.
First, the brouhaha mischaracterizes the proposal which is to make Homer and Vergil optional and not mandatory.

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From years of teaching Homer to undergraduates, fewer are prepared to read something of this length and depth. And, more importantly, we do not have the time to do it right.

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The worst thing I see happening—and I KNOW this happens at Oxford—is teaching Homer badly. Students don’t have the cultural frameworks, or the training to understand what they' re looking at

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And this is in part because many people who teach Homer have a backwards idea of what the epics are and how they work.

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These backwards ideas come from a teleological perspective that has over time selected from the past only works that conform to certain expectations and then forcing them to conform to others

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Teaching Homer badly is objectively a bad thing. It turns students off to Homer; it gives them misconceptions about the ancient world; and harmfully enforces the history of European literature

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Homer contains some nasty stuff. Taught in the wrong way, it glorifies violence, perpetuates misogyny, oversimplifies “heroes”, their "faults" and gives terrible lessons on life and death and eternal fame

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"reading" a text is not merely passing one's eyes over it or uttering the words aloud. It requires patience, contemplation, identification, alienation, communion with others and repetition

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This is about the way we teach Homer as a holy, simple thing, with clear messages and heroes who can be understood in a few lessons

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Homeric epics are dialogic, they are complex creations between audiences and the words themselves and without time, deep learning, and space, they function to advance a simplistic, but powerful policy of canon-enforcement

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Homer as often taught as canon—which is the main argument in many articles—is a product not of antiquity but of the time between antiquity and now.

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To disentangle the layers of interpretation and the centuries of misunderstandings that have accrued, students need sensitive reading skills and agile teachers.

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Before reading Homer, students need to learn to read, to understand the relationship between text and audience, and the operation of literature—and especially the literary canon—as part of cultural discourse.

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We are better off by spending time teaching students a few poems by Sappho or lyric and elegiac poets, if what we want to learn about is Greek culture and poetry.

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But if you read even passively, the stalwart Homeric defenders aren’t really interested in the past. They are interested in Homer as a marker of their own culture.

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And look at the way people defend it! In one piece, the author cries that Homer is the beginning of a Trojan war story that made London “New Troy”. No cultural supremacy or appropriation there.

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Yes, understanding Homer can be important for cultural literacy of the past, but it is not the only way to gain this (and most Renaissance paintings based on myth are not Homeric).

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Yes, Homer poses important questions about what it means to be a Human being—but Homeric universality is wildly overplayed. Who gets left out?

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Homer, as taught most places, is a genius author who laid the foundations of western literature. This is a tale of ‘authenticity’ and cultural hegemony which intentionally overlooks that the Homeric epics are products and well as producers of this culture

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They are classics because they have been selected and handed down as such. This “tradition” (Latin for “handing down”) reinforces its own authority and aesthetics in the process of transmission and reception.

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When we talk about what we should teach as the foundation of Classical Studies, we need to think about what our goals are, what we want students to be able to do when they are done.

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Making Homer optional is not “watering down” the curriculum. It is opening it up our education to do what we are supposed to do: critically and pointedly examine the past.

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Sure, advanced students, graduate students, professionals in the field, they should probably read Homer, but should everyone?

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I am not saying that we should not have students reading Homer—but that if we only have a small collection of classes, they can acquire critical language, reading, reasoning, and cultural skills in other ways.

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This is important both in focusing on what our undergraduate learning goals are and in thinking about what we want classical studies to become in the future

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Are we going to merely perpetuate the same training, beliefs and ideas over and over again without reflecting on where they come from or what they mean?

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Are we going to ignore the fact that our histories of the Mediterranean have been figuratively and literally whitewashed in the service of colonial, nationalist, and racist discourse?

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Or are we a field where we train people to think critically, to re-frame the past, and the reclaim it?

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As a Homerist, I think I’ve found myself in part by searching for “Homer”—and I think this is indeed one of the most salubrious effects of literature.

But I hated Homer when it was taught in translation. And I have seen many students fail to engage

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But this is not the only goal and this is not the Aristotelian end for Classical Studies. We need students to enter with the world with the ability to question and reframe the worth of the pasts we have inherited.

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Because if we keep doing the same thing over and over again, it is not going to turn out well.

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sententiaeantiquae.com/2020/02/27/on-…

Since there have been some mega-feelings on this #ReadingHomer thread, I have co-authored too books about reading Homer with @eltonteb

the wicked cheap books.google.com/books/about/Ho…

and the open access

chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/di…