Autism and Classical Myth: Hope 11 – Hercules, Blue Story, British Museum… thinking about children's choices

Why classical myth and autism?

Why classical myth and autism?

The idea for this project started to take shape at a meeting in 2008 with a special needs teacher, who mentioned that, in her experience and those of her colleagues, autistic children often enjoy classical myth. I began to wonder why this might be the case, and whether – as a classicist who researches, and loves, classical myth – there was anything I could contribute. I started this blog to report on my progress which was often sporadic until the launch of the Warsaw-based European Research Council-funded project Our Mythical Childhood (2016-22) to trace the role of classics in children’s culture.

My key contribution to the project is an exploration of classics in autistic children’s culture, above all by producing myth-themed activities for autistic children. This blog shares my progress, often along Herculean paths, including to a book of lessons for autistic children focusing on the Choice of Hercules between two very different paths in life. The image above, illustrating the homepage of this blog, is one of the drawings by Steve K. Simons, the book's illustrator, of a chimneypiece panel in a neoclassical villa at Roehampton in South West London. The lessons centre on this panel.

Friday 6 December 2019

Hope 11 – Hercules, Blue Story, British Museum… thinking about children's choices

With this posting, I turn in earnest to Hercules. I pretty well got there with the previous posting. Here the hero gets centre stage some more.

Tomorrow (Saturday 6th December 2019), I am going to be talking about Hercules at the British Museum. Specifically, I shall be talking about the Hercules who is relevant to the autism activities I am developing. The event is a study day on classical myth - to tie in which a new exhibition, on Troy, at the Museum. It's the cover of the exhibition guide that is illustrated to the right. I shall be talking about myth as it can be relevant today, and I shall speak about how it came to matter in the eighteenth century, and before then in Rome, and before that, in Greece. I shall talk about its appeal in particular as a way to think about an aspect of what children can experience as they are on the path to adulthood – namely what choices to make between different paths in life.

I shall include a reference to something very current: the film Blue Story which has recently been in the news in the UK: here for instance. The film's poster is illustrated to the left. In an interview on the radio the other week, probably on the Today programme, I heard the director, Rapman, saying that it is a film, above all, about making a choice between two contrary paths.

From a quick search, I’ve found a few references to the director talking about the film in these terms. For example, Rapman is reported in the Sunday Times for November 28th 2019 in a piece by Fariha Karim as stressing that the film "was intended to make youngsters involved in gangs think about their choices."

The film is innovative and timely. Its themes are perennial too. In the next posting, I’m planning to come at the angle of choice-making faced by young people – this time from the perspective not of something contemporary, but from the perspective of… Cicero.