Teaching with ‘The Song of Achilles’

As she did with Circe, Miller has stayed faithful to the received narratives of Achilles and Patroclus without following them submissively, putting new twists on old stories and injecting them with poignant, powerful first-person perspective that students will respond to.

Teaching with Circe

This creative faithfulness to Greek myth combined with the first-person female perspective we so rarely find in ancient literature gives Circe great potential as a teaching tool in mythology courses. Miller’s lively and brisk storytelling style gives the stories an immediacy and clarity that many undergraduates struggle to find in textbook tellings of myth, or even in myth source texts themselves like Euripidean tragedies. This post aims to give a few pointers for using popular fiction in class without feeling like you’ve somehow sold out on our rigorous (and sometimes stodgy) discipline.