by Rafaël Newman
Last month, after a three-year hiatus imposed by the pandemic, I was again able to participate in a once regular study-abroad junket, assisting a professor at the Swiss university where I serve as adjunct. The professor, to whom I happen to be married, was leading a group of 22 students on so-called Academic Travel, our university’s bi-annual USP: a ten-day sojourn in a country relevant to the topic of a course conducted otherwise in regular classes on the university’s campus in Lugano. The last time I went along on one of these trips, in 2019, the topic was commemoration of the Holocaust, and our destination was Poland, including the Auschwitz memorial site and the Jewish Cemetery in Łódź. This time, during the 2022 fall semester, the course was entitled “Writing and Re-Writing the Classics”; the primary texts were by Homer and Aeschylus and their respective modern interpreters; and we were bound for Greece.
Academic Travel traditionally follows midterms, so by the time we arrived in Athens the students had already read and discussed the Odyssey, in a new translation by Emily Wilson, as well as Circe (2018), Madeline Miller’s Stoppard-esque, “novelized” revision from the POV of a minor character. The syllabus called for them to turn now to the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s three-play account of the curse on the house of Atreus and our only extant tragic trilogy. On return to regular classes in Lugano in November, the class would then begin reading and discussing House of Names (2017), Colm Tóibín’s polyphonic re-writing of the tragedy, and consider the Irish author’s reframing of the ancient myth with a modern sensibility, his contemporary take on the psychological and, indeed, legal matters at stake in Aeschylus’s drama. Read more »