Italian novelist Umberto Eco said, “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” This unit is designed around that notion of retellings—the idea that authors draw on and transform stories that have already been told, and in the process, create new meanings.

In this unit, students will read, interpret, write about, and discuss four texts: the story of Icarus as told by Ovid in Metamorphoses; Anne Sexton’s short poem “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph”; Edward Field’s poem “Icarus”; and, finally, Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” During the course of their work with these texts, students will read, write about, and discuss the texts individually and as a set, comparing their characters, sequences of events, and meanings. All of this is designed to present students with an arc of work that sensitizes them to the aspect of literature that Eco highlights above: that writers often repurpose existing texts—by retelling, transforming, reframing—for new and different ends, and that they often tell stories that have “already been told.”