• Offered for Year: 2025/26

• Module Leader(s): Dr Susanna Phillippo

• Owning School: History, Classics and Archaeology
• Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus

Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Aims

The Odyssey: marvellous voyage with a fairy-tale ending, or grim battle for survival in a world of shifting rules? The Homeric epics derive from a long oral tradition, and while they stand at the very beginning of western literature, they are complex and multi-faceted works which have been interpreted in many different ways. This module will examine the Odyssey in the context of the early Greek epic tradition surrounding the Trojan War legend, and, more specifically, will explore its relationship with the other great Homeric epic, the Iliad, studying the parallels and contrasts between portrayals of heroes and heroism, narrative technique, characterization and emotion, and thematic design.

The module aims to train students to use details of a text for analysis and appreciation of:
•Stylistic and narrative design and effects
•Thematic patterns
•The handling of emotional impact
•The handling of character portrayal and of audience sympathies

The module aims to teach students to:
•Identify characteristic features of Homeric narrative technique, including those which reflect the Odyssey’s and the Iliad’s status as works designed for oral performance.
•Explore how these may work for an audience in a performance context, especially in terms of emotional and dramatic effect.

Outline Of Syllabus

The syllabus covers the following topics concerning Homeric epic, as these are manifested in the Odyssey, with comparison to the way similar elements and approaches are manifested in the Iliad at selected points:
Questions of design
Narrative technique:
•plot and thematic patterns
•narrative patterns
•description and narrative
•building themes
•handling narrative climaxes
•presentation of character
The heroic world
Immortals and mortality

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities

Jointly Taught With

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures (which also mostly include group work on applying lecture themes to specific passages) are designed to introduce students to overall approaches to the text, its techniques and its cultural background, and to illustrate to students how these ideas may be applied to the exploration of textual detail (and vice versa), giving students the opportunity to try this latter approach also for themselves.
Recorded lecture materials supplement the in-person lectures, giving students time to listen at more leisure to key concepts and ideas regarding some texts, with prompts to engage in related reflective activity.

Workshops give the students the opportunity to apply close reading techniques to excerpts from the texts.

Seminars are designed to give students the opportunity to engage with issues about and approaches to the text for themselves, both in preparing an oral presentation and in preparing to participate in discussion; and also to develop students' skills of oral and interpersonal communication.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Exams

Exam Pairings

Other Assessment

Formative Assessments

Formative Assessment is an assessment which develops your skills in being assessed, allows for you to receive feedback, and prepares you for being assessed. However, it does not count to your final mark.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The 'take-home paper' will comprise a mixture of commentary and essay questions.
Commentary questions assess students’ capacity to analyse passages in detail, usually as a basis for discussing characteristic features of the text as a whole. Essay questions assess students’ ability to assemble their knowledge of the text(s) studied into a coherent discussion of key overall questions about the text.
The open book format tests the students' skills of working within a restricted time-frame to a specific tight brief, while allowing them to consult the range of primary material necessary for a strong detailed analysis.

The assignment tests students' skills in analysing and interpreting narrative techniques within the texts, applying for themselves skills practised in lectures and workshop sessions.

Formative: seminars and preparation for these form part of normal independent study/class preparation for the module. In the seminar sessions students work together in small sub-groups to collate their ideas and prepare a short presentation to be delivered before the rest of the seminar group; in principle each student has the opportunity to deliver a presentation once, working usually in pairs. Seminar work feeds in to students' developing their ideas and techniques of literary analysis, in ways important to both formative assessments. The oral presentation aspect further develops skills involving: team-work, selection and collation of material, oral communication and the ability to select and present key concepts clearly and coherently.

Reading Lists

• CAC2054's Reading List

Timetable

• Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
• CAC2054's Timetable