This interview appeared in the Spring 2021 Letters & Science magazine.
Will Brockliss first encountered Perseus beheading the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa when he was in second grade. The story sparked a lifelong passion for the ancient world in the associate professor from the department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, who received the Class of 1955 Teaching Excellence Award in 2020. In his popular Ancient Greek and Roman Monsters course on campus, and in classes he teaches to students in the Odyssey Project (a UW-Madison program designed to offer low-income adult learners the chance to earn college credit), Brockliss wows his students with the horrors of ancient Greek and Roman mythology.
We sat down with Brockliss to ask about teaching and about monsters. His replies, condensed below:
I hope that the diverse constituencies of students I work with take away new perspectives on their experiences and the world. But, to be honest, I’d be gratified if they benefit from encountering me to anywhere near the extent that I benefit from meeting them. Every time I visit the Wisconsin Junior Classical League [a statewide consortium of high-school classics clubs] or the Odyssey Project, I come away with a renewed sense of purpose. I’ve known nothing quite like the electric, boisterous, joyful atmosphere of the WJCL: The students’ enthusiasm for the ancient world is infectious.
When it comes to the particular things we do in class, I could go on about projects comparing modern and ancient serial killers or students writing Valentine’s cards from the Gorgon. But I’m very fortunate in that the subject matter that I teach tends to speak for itself. My three-year-old daughter is excited about constellations, dinosaurs and monsters—anything that provokes a sense of wonder. We shouldn’t ever lose our sense of childlike wonder. Monsters are wonderful in that they remove us utterly from the humdrum everyday world. To the extent that students respond to a particular aspect of my teaching, they often talk about my enthusiasm for the material. That requires no special thought or preparation—I simply love this stuff.
The Greeks and Romans have their child-killers (Medea), their cannibals (the Cyclops), and perhaps even their serial killers (Procrustes, his ax, and his bed). We’ve built on the foundations offered by ancient artists and authors and added some new kinds of monsters, such as vampires and zombies. These creatures speak to our fear of disease. Up until recently, for many of us in the West, that was only a fear, and put off to some distant future.
Horror is perhaps the most honest of aesthetic modes. It refuses to let us ignore the most basic facts about our bodies (our physical corruptibility, our general ickiness) and our minds. Yes, it taps one of our most basic, powerful, and (sometimes) thrilling of emotions (fear), but it also develops from, and explores, other facets of our psychological makeup, which may provide us with less intense experiences than fear but are nonetheless constant presences in our lives. Things like grief and memory. The past (and not just, or perhaps not even mainly, our personal experiences) haunts us, like the revenant of horror. It is always about to return.
