Prof. Katharine Streip on The Odyssey, Quentin Tarantino, and the Wine Blue Sea

Katharine Streip received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published essays on Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, and William S. Burroughs. Her research interests include comedy, the novel, 19th c. Paris and modernism.

I'm sitting in on some of her classes at Concordia University's Liberal Arts College, which offers "a unique Great Books, multidisciplinary Core Curriculum designed to provide the foundations of an education for life." Here, as part of The Biblio File Book Club, we discuss Homer's Odyssey, and with it topics including revenge, Quentin Tarantino, home and family, identity, the slaughter of suitors, the craving for experience, the desire to learn, curiosity, intelligence, problem solving, Penelope, gifts, the practice of hospitality, sacred strangers, recklessness, repetition in texts, double standards, suspicion, character arcs, women as betrayers, and the "wine blue" sea. 

The Biblio File Book Club is series of book discussions with smart people about books that they believe are important; books they would recommend to loved ones...books they consider to be essential reading.