List of Works

Here is a partial list of the works that might be discussed in a typical year in Odyssey Beyond Wars classes. In addition, students examine art ranging from ancient Greece to modern America, sample musical styles, participate in the UW’s Go Big Read program, work on vocabulary, and complete creative and academic writing assignments.

Poetry: Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Randall Jarrell, Maxine Hong Kingston, Kevin Powers, Brian Turner, and others

Fiction:  Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh, Chinua Achebe’s Civil Peace, Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone, and others

Autobiography: Chester Nez’s Code Talker, Karl Marlantes’ What It’s Like to Go to War, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Sebastian Junger’s WAR, Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers and Thank You For Your Service, Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More than You

Plays: William Shakespeare’s Henry V, Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s An Iliad, Peter Rothstein’s All is Calm

Philosophical works: St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle