Head of Department Kelli C. Rudolph speak about this year’s pre-reading: Class Clown: On Boris Johnson’s Virtuosic Misquotation of Homer.
During Welcome Week, (virtual) discussion groups, led by your academic advisers, will give you a chance to talk about the ideas in this article.
We will focus on the following questions:
- Why does Johnson quote Homer? What are his stated reasons? What are the unstated reasons he might have done this?
- What are the different ways we can view Johnson’s recitation of Homer?
- What does his performance imply about identity – His own? His audiences? Homer’s?
- What does his performance say about who is “in” and who is “out”?
- Is a performance like this good or bad for Classics?
- Who is “in” and who is “out” when we speak about our subject?
- As a community that embraces diverse viewpoints, how do our own contributions, our own ‘performances’ – in class, online, over coffee – form a picture of who we are?
- How does your own experience or knowledge relate to the ideas presented here?
You might have your own questions about this article too: what it means, or what point it’s trying to make. The Welcome Week discussion group is a place for you to come with all of your questions, it’s not about having answers.
This will be the starting point for lots of different discussions, and you might even find that it changes the way you think about this, your chosen field. The rest is up to you!
Further reading:
- Stephen Blair. “Erasing History: The Roman Way to Memorialize a Painful Past” Eidolon
- Rebecca Futo Kennedy. “We Condone it by Our Silence: Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Supremacy”