Ransom
North Sydney
:
Knopf Australia
,
2009
Z1529380
2009
single work
novel
(taught in 20 units)
'With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf revisits Homer's Iliad. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are explored.' (Publisher's blurb)
Complete Plays - Marlowe
Penelopiad - Atwood
Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens
Through the lens of early modern attitudes to translation - the 'carrying over' of elements of extant texts - this course investigates the ways in which authors make 'old' texts active in 'new' texts. David Malouf's Ransom, Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Christopher Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus will be studied in conjunction with 1) extracts from the classical texts on which these writers draw: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses 2) selected theoretical writings about imitatio and related terms, 3) key terms in the practice of literary imitation and allusion (e.g. characterisation, genre, intertext), and 4) elements of contemporary literary theory (e.g. postcolonialism, feminism, intertextuality). The course is particularly well suited to students who have studied Shakespeare, and to those wishing to study the Advanced level course Adaptation.
