Odysseus In Homer's Odyssey '

With this being my first semester at Saint Mary’s and coming here as a transfer student I did not know what to make of Seminar at first. I understood seminar’s purpose to be a course that taught students about how to think critically and then how to share those thoughts in a constructive forum. This course challenges students to not only be able to think critically, but to also be able to express their thoughts to one another through both writing and discussion. The specific goal of seminar is to foster within students a “genuine sense of collegiality and intellectual community by providing an authentic forum for students to meet and… engage in collaborative dialogue about texts that shape our world” (Western Tradition, vii). Though I found

Throughout the class I was really challenged not only by the range of texts that were required reading, but the many varied interpretations of the text that my classmates shared. One text in particular, Odysseus, I often found myself at odds with the way that many of my classmates thought of the story’s protagonist. In some ways I could identify with Odysseus in a way other students could not because like him I had traveled quite extensively and many times been thrust into circumstances that were far beyond my control. Odysseus’ journey was fraught with immense challenges and he was often at the mercy of either the gods or his enemies. Many of classmates found that the time Odysseus had spent as Calypso’s lover (Fagles, 159) to be a sign of his infidelity with his own wife which skewed their view of his moral character. As our reading progressed the majority opinion amongst the class of Odysseus’ character began to portray him as a prideful man who dealt with his rivals in a rather cruel and malicious way. My own experiences as a military man who lived overseas away from home for long stretches of time helped me to identify with Odysseus’ plight. The world can often times be a cruel place and there are times in life where you may have to make morally questionable choices in

In order to even have something to share with the class in the first place it was up to each of us to read, understand, and analyze the texts we were given for their meaning. This by far was probably most enjoyable part of the class for me personally, partly because I found many of the texts we read to have quite a bit of philosophical content. During the course I found the readings with Marcus Aurelius and Aristotle of particular interest and much of what they had to say spoke to me on a personal level. For example, I found Aristotle’s understanding about the distinction between concord and friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics to be very apt. Though the difference between these two types of relationships can seem minute, a large distinction can be made between them in terms of common interest. Citizens of a country may have concord with one another when their interests align even if they can at times have separate and even contrasting goals (Aristotle, 99). This makes it a bad way to think about friendship because more often friends are often aligned by their interests, goals, and