Assignment for Tuesday, 12-13-16

Dear Mythologists,

All good things must come to an end. For Tuesday, December 13, our last class of the semester, please do the following:

(1) Watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2000), taking notes as you see fit. In addition to the DVD being reserved at the library, the film is also streaming on Amazon.

(2) Read Janice Siegel's exhaustive essay, "The Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Homer’s Odyssey," which elucidates just about every possible parallel between the film and the epic poem. Hers is important work, given the Coens' testimony that they'd never bothered to read the Odyssey.  Siegel proves the brothers to be artful, Odysseus-like double-dealers.

And, yes, the piece is many pages long, but (a) they're small, journal-sized pages, and (b) the article itself is very accessible, if not downright breezy. You'll be glad you took the time.

(3) Remember by noon on Tuesday to comment on this post with your choice of a sequence from O Brother to view in class.

DC