The Iliad and the "detour" of the ancient Greek epic: Reading experiences at school

This article analyses statements made by teachers from French-speaking Switzerland who participated in the 2019 public reading of The Iliad held in many venues as part of the European Festival of Greek and Latin. As we will see, these teachers prepared two groups of students for the performance that the public reading represents by means of teaching scenarios which call on the notion of the "detour across other languages and cultures". This will therefore be the focus of this paper, which is divided into four sections. The first describes the research context; the second draws on the literature to define the notion of the ‘detour’; the third analyses the teacher interviews where the teaching scenarios are described; and the last section offers a concluding discussion of the notion of the ‘detour’ in the light of the data analysed, and identifies four typologies: detours across culture, across linguistic forms, across text structure and across the performative dimension.