Shakespeare's Facebook

An effective example of modern-style storytelling. Quite genially planned.

SlideShare

Among the many useful web-tools you can use there is SlideShare. It works just like YouTube, only with PowerPoint slides instead of videos. You might wanna use it to upload your presentation slides and embed them on the blog for everyone to see.

Here's an example, actually about .ppt presentations. So a presentation about how to make a presentation. A meta-presentation. Whatever.
Watch it (do you watch a presentation?): it is actually pretty useful.

How to make effective presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: satyajeet singh)

Odyssey

Among your assignments (again) you will be reading (or re-reading for the more classically trained of you) the Odyssey. In order to make the Odyssey less of an odyssey, I'm once again posting some useful links (which, take care, can not substitute for the actual reading of Homer's exquisite poetry).

General Information and Summaries

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey
• http://www.mythweb.com/odyssey/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20040909.shtml (Click on 'Listen Again')
• http://www.angelfire.com/art/archictecture/articles/odsum.htm

Translations

• http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html
• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0218
• http://books.google.com/books?q=odyssey&btnG=Search+Books

Of course, if you are more old-fashioned and you want to have the real thing, buying it will certainly do your soul some good.

Demeter and Persephone. Remake.

Among your assignments, this first term you'll have to consider the myth of Demeter and Persephone and re-tell the story in your own way. Once your version is ready, you will post it on this blog, titling the post '(yourname)'s Demeter and Persephone'. The other users/students will comment below your post. The details will be explained by Sian during the first lecture.
To facilitate you (that's what TAs are for) in your duty, I'm posting here a series of links. Moreover, I've added the Perseus Digital Library in the 'Useful Links' section: it will turn out to be useful for all sorts of Latin and Greek texts.

General Information

• http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/imageswomen/papers/paolicchidemeter/demeter.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demeter
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persephone

Re-tellings of Demeter and Persephone

• http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/demeterceresmyth/a/demeterbrothers.htm
• http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/3497/demeter.html

Interpretations

• http://zero-point.tripod.com/pantheon/Demeter.html
• http://www.endicott-studio.com/rdrm/rrpersephone.html
• http://www.mother-god.com/demeter_and_persephone.html

Our Classroom

Quick shot of our future classroom (taken from behind the door's glass, it was locked when I went for my inspection...). The room is in the Vernon Square campus, number V326. Enter from the main door, walk to the lifts in front of the Byte2Eat cafe, enter in the lift (if it's there, if it works, if you really want to come), press the button 3 (three), wait approximately 17 seconds, walk through the opening door, and here you go, you are right in front of it.

Negative note: it's pretty small. We'll most probably have to change it in the next weeks. Unless you really like standing up.
Positive note: it seems to have some pretty big windows that you can actually open. Rooms in Vernon are infamously hot.

Mythic Video

An amusing video about Norse mythology (Sian will clarify how and why this is interesting to us). The main purpose anyway is to encourage you to create your own videos, upload them somewhere (YouTube, Photobucket...), and embed them on the blog.

Course Description

This course offers an advanced and comprehensive introduction to a recent, ongoing, and controversial debate within the contemporary field of mythology which has argued for the need to view myth and mythmaking, as well as scholarly analyses and theorisations of myths and mythmaking, as political artefacts embedded in, productive of, and in turn produced by power/knowledge relations. Some contemporary scholars of myth and mythmaking (e.g., Barthes, Lincoln, McCutcheon), whose work will provide the intellectual framework for the course, have thus argued that the overly narrow categorisation of myth as ‘fictional story’ should be deconstructed in order to trace the political interests and effects that are at work in the maintenance of distinctions between truthful and false narratives and, further, that this self-imposed definitional limitation on the field of mythology should itself be constituted as an object of analysis. As such, these scholars have sought to expand definitions of myth to include any narratives or discursive forms, cultural practices, or historical events that are constituted publicly or privately as coherent and continuous, or as foundational for assertions of identity or identification, whether individual or collective. This course will, in taking the challenge of these scholars seriously, thus attempt to expand common definitions and classifications of myth in order to examine how historical and contemporary forms of mythmaking (whether in nationalist discourse, art criticism, oral storytelling, advertising, or psychoanalysis, for example) serve both as a mirror of prevailing social and personal identities and a powerfully coercive template for their formation. The course will be structured in two parts. The first half of the course will examine the emergence and scholarly analysis of the category ‘myth’ historically. The second part of the course will track the development of understandings of myths and their implication in the politics of identity through a series of case studies including, but not limited to: myth and colonialism; the Grimm Brothers’ fairytales and their relationship to German nationalism; myth and antisemitism; feminist revisions of myths and folktales; the ‘War on Terror’.