Epic Literature As A Mythopoesis of Recognition and Reclamation (original) (raw)
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Centre for odyssean studies. The Upper and The Under World in homeric and archaic epic. Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on the Odyssey. Ithaca, August 25-29, 2017 Editors Μenelaos Christopoulos Machi Paϊzi-Apostolopoulou, 2020
The Odyssey is the story of a wanderer, of an explorer ‘who saw many men’s cities and he discovered many men’s minds.’ Odysseus travels backwards and forwards in place and time telling his adventures and his painful past in his journey from Troy to various provinces, from Calypso’s fairy Ogygia to the land of the Phaiakians, from the mythical Underworld to Ithaca itself. In Odyssey V the sea hurls Odysseus against the rocks and then tears him away, ripping the skin from his hands as he tries to grasp the rocks. The shipwrecked hero is washed up on the coast of Phaiacia, where he finds shelter in a bed of fallen leaves (Odyssey V 488-491). This is the place where Nausica discovers him alone and exhausted. In his journey to the Underworld (Od. XI) Odysseus sees the shade of his mother Anticleia who warns him that Penelope is still waiting for him, but she, his mother, could not endure her son’s loss and she killed herself. Odysseus’ return to Ithaca is foreshadowed by the image of the couple’s bed carved by Odysseus himself from an olive tree (Od. XXIII) and the recognition scene between Laertes and his son (XXIV). Much of Micheal Longley’s response to Homer is based on these episodes in the Odyssey focusing on the themes of Odysseus’ sense of vulnerability and experiences, his homecoming, his relationship with epic figures. The Irish poet who read Classics at the Trinity College Dublin, reworks the Homeric scenes of turbulence and suffering making ‘lyric, not epic, a major medium for Homer reception’. The present paper intends to explore the Homeric resonances from Odyssey in the light of the Homeric poems of the poet Michael Longley who focuses on the heroic figure of Odysseus and his vulnerable journey in time and space. From Homer’s epic to Irish contemporary poetry, Michael Longley’s poetic affiliation with Homer is not only central to his work but it also ‘allows the reader to hear the ancient text without previous knowledge of it’.
Another Rosy-fingered False Dawn: The Endless Homecoming of Odysseus
Occidental World, 2021
If a latter-day BBC poll is indeed correct that Homer's The Odyssey is the most influential tale ever told, it is an indirect but unsurprising vindication of Dana Gioia's premillennial lament over the absence of extended verse in modern poetry, particularly his observation that, faced with the prospect of writing on an epic scale, such figures as Robert Graves and Howard Nemerov turned to the novel as their mode of choice, part of a pattern of avoidance of the long poetic form.
Odysseus: From Herald to Hero, 2021
This paper is an extract from the fourth book in the Homeric Traditions series: "The Narrative Delta Tradition: Iliadic Fairy Tales." It provides evidence that Odysseus has grown over the centuries from a herald - the Bronze Age diplomat - to the cunning hero who endures the most dangerous adventures on his return journey to Ithaka in the Odyssey. This evolution starts with the Delta type scene of the brave scout in forerunners of the Iliad and the Little Iliad. From there the brave scout scene has mixed with the Mykenaian king story and the telestory. Finally, it became popular in the Ionian Epsilon tradition and the Odyssey. Many characteristics of Odysseus and motifs in the Odyssey are explained by the type scene of the brave scout. In this way, this paper challenges many beliefs about the Homeric Question.
As Odysseus cautiously prepares to enter the straits plagued by Charyb-dis and Scylla, he encourages his crew by referring to his earlier success against the Cyclops (Od. 12.208–12). This article argues that the Odyssey constructs the Scylla adventure as a tale of heroic failure in contrast with the Cyclops episode. Special attention is paid to narrative paradigms that underlie the Scylla episode and emphasize Odysseus' inability to defeat the monster. I further show that the Cyclops/Scylla contrast serves both as an argument presented to Odysseus' internal Phaeacian audience and an interpretive key for the external audience.
Lies and realities? The alternative personas and fictional narratives of Odysseus
The Odyssey, in some part a sequel to the Iliad, is the second work attributed to the epic poet Homer. Within, the protagonist Odysseus is seemingly portrayed as a shrewd and crafty individual, constantly altering the truth to suit his own intentions. The history contained within the text not only illuminates the excavation of early Greek material culture, such as Agamemnon’s palace at Mycenae (Murray, O. 1993, 5) but also, the history taught by the Odyssey enlightens us to how the world was seen through the eyes of the early Greeks and the rationale behind the material culture found today (Osborne, R. 2009: 148-150). Notably, within the second twelve books of Homer’s Odyssey, these lies of Odysseus reveal a potential number of truths about early Greece’s social, economic and religious beliefs and morals.
The question of the authorship of the two Homeric epics - whether there was one Homer, or two - has vexed scholars since the inception of critical literary study. The more bellicose, less inner and mysterious Iliad was by far the more popular poem in antiquity. And although the later Aeneid of Virgil tendentiously fuses together war and nostos (homecoming), it is of arms and a man, not a man of many ways and wiles, that the Roman poet sings. Odysseus is likened, invidiously, to a Canaanite (Phoenician) traveling merchant in his flexibility and adaptability - he, the "rootless cosmopolitan" of his remote age, resonates with the predicament of alienation of modern man and with the psychological depth of the modern literary sensibility, then bellicose, candid, limited Achilles and Aeneas. It is proposed in the article that the Odyssey employs the topos of a man traveling in search of lost members of his family, with a happy resolution, that seems indeed to have been peculiarly popular over many centuries with Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The author suggests indeed that Menaechmus, the name of a character in a play based on this topos with a Punic setting that might even have been performed, in a Northwest Semitic translation in Qart.adast (Newtown, i.e., Carthage) itself, is merely the very common Hebrew name Menachem. And it is noted that the topos recurs, employed in aid of religious propaganda of the Jewish Christians, in the setting of the PseudoClementine Recognitions.