The Adventures of Ulysses

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Ulysses’s Adventures in Art”

After reading The Adventures of Ulysses, students demonstrate their understanding of plot and theme by evaluating artistic representations of 3 of Ulysses’s adventures.

Ulysses’s adventures are the subject of many paintings, sculptures, comics, and other forms of art. For this project, you will choose 3 of his adventures and find pieces of art that portray each adventure. Then, you will write brief explanations of how well each piece of art portrays the plot and theme of the original adventure.

• Choose 3 adventures to focus on.
• Find artistic representations of these 3 adventures. The art you choose should be still images—paintings, a series of comic panels, etc.—not moving images (film, GIFs, animated cartoons, etc.).
• Create a document that has the following parts for each work of art:

o The title of the artistic work and its creator’s name

o An image of the artistic work, along with a citation of its source in MLA style or another accepted style

o A paragraph-length explanation, supported by evidence from The Adventures of Ulysses, of whether the artistic work does or does not accurately portray the plot and theme of the adventure it represents

Teaching Suggestion: Should your students require a review of theme before beginning work on this assignment, this 4-minute video may be helpful to them. If your students work well in small groups, consider dividing the class into groups of three or four and asking all group members to focus on the same three stories. When they finish the assignment, ask the group members to rank the artistic representations selected by group members according to how well each portrays the plot and theme of the relevant adventure. If your students are better off working individually, you might offer time after they complete the assignment for several students to share their work with the rest of the class and discuss the merits of these works as a whole class.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students who struggle with abstract thought may have difficulty understanding theme, even after viewing the video linked above. For these students, you might model thinking through one of the adventures to discover its theme. Visually impaired students, depending upon their degree of visual impairment, may not be able to complete the assignment as written. A reasonable alternative would be for these students to choose three adventures and find audio clips of music that they feel accurately represent the themes of these adventures.

Paired Text Extension:

This activity can also be applied successfully to Evslin’s Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths, although for some of the stories Evslin shares in this anthology, there will be fewer artistic works to choose from.

Teaching Suggestion: If you choose to teach Evslin’s Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths and apply this activity to the anthology, consider offering some guidance about which of the stories are most well-known and have been most frequently represented in art, in order to minimize the required research time.