This undergraduate course investigates the cultural construction, transmission, and transformation of major female figures in ancient Greek literature and their subsequent reinterpretations in modern texts. Concentrating on Helen, Penelope, Cassandra, Circe and Medea, the course interrogates how these figures are embedded within the poetic, political, and philosophical conditions of archaic and classical Greece, and how their meanings are reconfigured across later historical moments.

Our inquiry begins with sustained close readings of Homeric epic and Attic tragedy, including the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as selected plays by Aeschylus and Euripides. These works are approached not merely as repositories of myth but as culturally situated performances that articulate and regulate gendered norms. Students will examine how femininity is constructed at the intersection of oikos and polis, speech and silence, visibility and marginalization. Particular attention is given to the narrative and dramaturgical mechanisms through which female figures are idealized, demonized, eroticized, or rendered politically disruptive.

The course then turns to modern rearticulations by Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, Madeline Miller and James Joyce, whose texts engage in complex dialogues with their classical antecedents. These rewritings frequently displace the authority of the canonical narrative, foreground suppressed perspectives, and expose the ideological investments that underpin inherited mythic structures. Through comparative analysis, students will assess how modern authors mobilize ancient material to interrogate questions of authorship, agency, historical memory, and the politics of representation.

Theoretical frameworks from feminist criticism and reception studies will guide our discussions. Drawing on the work of Nicole Loraux and Rita Felski, we will consider how interpretive communities shape the meanings ascribed to female figures and how gender operates as a site of both symbolic contestation and cultural continuity. Judith Butler’s account of gender as performative and culturally reiterated, provides a critical lens through which to reassess the apparent stability of “the feminine” in both ancient and modern contexts. Reception theory, informed by scholars such as Lorna Hardwick, further enables us to conceptualize classical texts not as static, but as dynamic forms within an ongoing network of cultural fermentation.

By the conclusion of the course, students will have developed a sophisticated understanding of how female figures function as sites of ideological production, aesthetic experimentation, and historical reimagination across temporal and cultural boundaries.