Shipwrecked: Conversion, Redemption, and Salvation in Shipwreck Narratives

4 credits · Undergraduate

The course focuses on several crucial shipwreck narratives in Homer’s Odyssey, the Ancient Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a shipwreck survived by Apostle Paul, in imperial Roman romance novels, and in Shakespeare’s Tempest to examine long-distance trade and the impact of maritime catastrophes on narratives that encapsulate encounters with the divine, conversions, shifts in religious and personal identity, and concepts of paradise. We will look at ship-building innovations and trade routes to provide context and use cultural anthropology and literary theory to identify how the narrators use shipwrecks to fashion the relation between nature, the divine, and humans as individuals and members of a society.