Homer's Odyssey Research Articles

Sirens in reverse: the therapist's voice in postmodernity

This qualitative investigation and bibliographical foundation aim to present, based on the historical figure of the sirens mentioned in Homer's Odyssey, a metaphor that reflects the role of therapists with patients in postmodernity. The hero Odysseus ties himself to the mast of the ship to resist the seductive songs of the sirens. While the symbol of the sirens remains the same, postmodernity has amplified the seductive power of the sirens with swift and increasingly personalized information through marketing algorithms that govern everyday life. Therapy initially assists in giving people strength so they don't drown, but in the face of the initial situation, this is not enough. Therapists must act as reverse sirens, guiding the shipwrecked back to their ships so that all these postmodern Odysseuses can find their way home, to themselves.

Game-changing Homeric memory: Odysseys before and after Joyce

ABSTRACT This article connects new modernist studies with memory studies and classical reception studies. It addresses the perennial conundrum about the relation between James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the Homeric Odyssey, showing how modernist memories operate backwards and forwards in time. Ulysses had a fundamental—truly game-changing—impact on memories of the Odyssey over the past century. With Ulysses, the imagination of the figure of Odysseus was profoundly altered: from hero to everyman, from seafarer to urban flâneur, from cunning soldier (and merciless suitor-slayer) to an essentially good, contemplative man, from Greek king in search of home to a transcultural traveller. The Odyssey is one of the richest examples of longue durée mnemohistories, and across time, its memory has exerted enormous game-changing agency. Joyce draws on the Odyssey’s mnemonic energy, but he redirects it: He turns his Ulysses into a good and a transcultural man. The resonance of these changes can still be felt in present-day discussions of refugees as new Odysseus figures. It is also palpable in contemporary literature, as in Emilie Pine’s Ruth & Pen (2022), which inserts female, queer, and neurodivergent experiences into Odyssean memory.

Epic Echoes in The Wind in the Willows by Georgia L. Irby

Reviewed by: Epic Echoes in The Wind in the Willows by Georgia L. Irby Daniel Harris-McCoy Epic Echoes in The Wind in the Willows. By Georgia L. Irby. Routledge Focus on Classical Studies. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. Pp. x + 140. Hardback, $59.95. ISBN: 978-1-032-10510-9. In this book, Georgia Irby lays out in full what scholars have previously explored only on a piecemeal basis, namely, that Kenneth Grahame's children's classic, The Wind in the Willows (WW), is profoundly indebted to Greco-Roman epic and especially Homer's Odyssey. This debt should not surprise anyone. Grahame was something of a phenom at Greek and Latin. But, for better or worse, his ambitions for further study at Oxford were frustrated by a stingy uncle and thus possibly sublimated in his literary works, which feature a large number of classical references. In WW in particular, Grahame recycles episodes, tropes and themes found in Homer (and Virgil and, in comic form, in the Batrachomyomachia) including the themes of home, travel, hospitality, heroism and bardic metapoesis. Some may question the need for a book that examines, in great detail, epic reception in WW. I would offer three responses: First, that Irby's book, as a study in reception, is a worthy companion to the several volumes and projects on the reception of classical culture in children's literature that have appeared in recent years. Second, as a study in intertextuality, Irby reveals Grahame's intense, granular engagement with his ancient sources. Finally, WW is, simply put, a beloved literary masterpiece whose fans ranged from Theodore Roosevelt to original Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett. For all these reasons, this reviewer believes that Irby's specialized study is well merited. The book's contents fall into nine chapters. The first two zoom out from the text to address the broadly classical nature of Grahame's writings and its [End Page 371] underpinnings. Thus, in Chapter 1, we learn about Grahame's classical education, know-ledge of Greek and Latin and his literary interests, ancient and otherwise. We also get a preliminary survey of evidence for his engagement with the classics in WW and elsewhere. Irby's discussion here is good and her bibliography up-todate, though an even more in-depth discussion of Grahame's "classical" biography would be of interest and could serve as a ripe topic for a future article. Chapter 2 assists in the transition to the close-readings conducted in the later chapters by surveying the classical and, in particular, epic elements found in WW. The content of this chapter is diverse to the point of sometimes feeling a bit scattershot, but does provide food for thought and is returned to from time to time in the material that comes afterwards. The remaining chapters provide examples of intertexts organized according to major themes that will be familiar to any student of ancient epic and the Odyssey in particular, e.g. heroic traits and behaviors, the clever hero, wanderlust, kleos/aristeia and return/nostos. Though organized into theme-based chapters, Irby's analyses have a list-like quality that will convince the reader of the depth of Grahame's engagement with his classical sources partly through the sheer number of parallels that she identifies. In this sense, Irby's text feels fundamental, like it's exploring a literary relationship in depth for the first time. To her credit, Irby is aware that there are many possible explanations for Grahame's engagement with classical epic: biography, history, parody, literary/aesthetic reverence and the productive dissonance generated by the inclusion of simultaneously adult and childlike material. As mentioned, Irby offers some explanation for Grahame's inclusion of classical material based on his biography and historical milieu in her opening chapter, relating it in particular to the rapid technological progress of his age and the need for Odysseus-like heroes to navigate societal change (e.g. 8, 22). In the close readings themselves, however, Irby does not commit as much to a particular vantagepoint for explaining or interpreting the intertexts she identifies. This has the benefit of allowing Irby to include more material...

Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns by Carol Dougherty

Reviewed by: Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns by Carol Dougherty Hilary J. C. Lehmann Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns. By CAROL DOUGHERTY. Classical Presences. Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 175. Hardback, $90.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-881401-6. You can't step into the same river twice, and you can never return to the same home you left. When you (a reader, a teacher) come back to the Odyssey after some time, it is not the same epic it was because you are not the same you. Something you've read, or watched, or lived through in the meantime sparks a new way of reading this old, familiar text. If you're like me (and, if you're reading this, you probably are) you think about the Odyssey all the time. I'm not a Homerist, but the Odyssey is under my skin. I bring it with me into everything I read or write, every class discussion or casual conversation; in turn, every time I come back to the Odyssey, I bring back to it everything I've experienced since our last encounter. Carol Dougherty is well known for her sophisticated yet accessible theoretical readings of Homer and archaic poetry. What a delight, when encountering her new monograph Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature, to realize that, of course, famous classicists also walk around with the Odyssey under their skin. Travel and Home, published through the Classical Presences series, is a very new sort of book. As much a study of the influence of Homer on contemporary literature as of the influence of contemporary literature on Homer, this book models a dynamic sort of reception using improvisation and nostalgia as its interpretive framework. This approach is appealingly subjective, as reading truly is a personal experience: the occasional presence of such phrases as "we might compare" (101 n.12) or "this calls to mind" (103, n.18) reminds us that we have been graciously invited to accompany Dougherty, a very smart but still relatable reader, on her own personal journey through the Odyssey and 20th and 21st-century fiction. The book's Introduction explains the improvisational approach by framing it through Odysseus' own improvisations, his process of finding himself by testing different, polytropic, versions of himself over the course of the poem, and through the improvisational nature of epic performance—like Odysseus, the bard changes his narrative on each occasion to suit the performative time and place. Following this Introduction, each of the book's chapters focuses on a different novel: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1994), Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Rebecca West's [End Page 242] The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Toni Morrison's Home (2012). These five novels are thematically arranged in two groups, the first three exploring the opposition between staying and leaving and the last two focusing on the role of nostalgia in reestablishing a returning soldier's identity following the traumas of war. Each chapter dances between the Odyssey and the novel under discussion, offering deep and rich readings of both. The section on The English Patient, a novel of slowly revealed pasts, found identities and reinvented homes, provides an elegant model for the subsequent chapters as well as a kind of thesis statement on the relationship between reading and home: "Texts like the Odyssey and The English Patient not only take us to new places, fashioning worlds beyond our imagination, but they create new homes for us to inhabit there, even if just for a while, even if we soon long to leave them and return home again" (43). The second and third chapters destabilize the gendered binary between home and travel. In Housekeeping, the protagonists–the transient Sylvie and her nieces Ruth and Lucille–wrestle with the question of whether "the essence of domesticity" is found in the house, or with those who occupy it (62). In the end, Lucille remains at home while Ruth and Sylvie set off to make...

Metal and Mettle: Odyssean Elements of the Racialized Body and Oddsee's Hybridity in Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (2015)

This article compares the idealism underwriting both the survival of Odysseus' family in Homer's Odyssey and hybridity in Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home from the Wars (2015). Building upon an instance of indirect transmission from Homer to Fagles to Parks, it argues that Parks' creation of a hybrid human canine figure not only queries hybridity's role as the telos of Black liberation and racial justice but also sheds new light on the role of Argos and Telemachus for the idealized image that concludes the Odyssey. Reflecting on Parks' nuanced rejection of the idea that Father Comes Home from the Wars is an adaptation of the Odyssey, this article closes by explaining the urgency of directly addressing the challenges of being a racialized teacher in the Classics classroom rather than idealizing those teachers as the self-evident resolution of the racism in the field.

Alexandre Dumas's Odyssey: Race, Slavery, Narrative

AbstractAlexandre Dumas père left behind few explicit reflections on race and slavery in the modern world, but he was not silent on these subjects. Before the tireless deeds of the musketeers, or the vengeful fantasies of the Count of Monte-Cristo, there was Georges, an 1843 novel of race and slave rebellion set on the island of Mauritius. This essay explores questions of homecoming, homelessness, and recognition in the novel. It argues that the text incorporates a series of references to the Homeric Odyssey and that these come to illuminate the complexities of a problem faced by metropolitan French novelists of the nineteenth century: What manner of plot might grasp, or fail to grasp, the interlocking injustices of racism and slavery? After all, Georges does not conclude with homecoming and recognition, as the model of the Odyssey might imply, but with homelessness.

Like Father, Like Son? Reading & Rereading Homer's Odyssey in Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey

Like Father, Like Son? Reading & Rereading Homer's Odyssey in Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey

Do We Have a New Song Yet? The New Wave of Women’s Novels and the Homeric Tradition

The relationship between women and classical antiquity, its texts, artefacts, and study, has been fraught to say the least; the discipline of Classics has often been defined by the exclusion of women, in terms of their education and their ability to contribute to debates more generally. However, we are currently in the middle of an astonishing period when women are laying more of a claim to the discipline than ever before. This article examines three recent novels by women which take on the cultural weight of the Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey, to explore the possibilities of a ‘new song’ that foregrounds female characters. The novels experiment with different narrative voices and are self-conscious about the practices of story-telling and of bardic song. Their awareness of their challenge to and contest with Homeric tradition renders their ‘new songs’ fragile as well as precious.

Circe’s Garden: Rewriting Epic and Revolutionary Time

This article focuses on two retellings of the story of Circe, the witch from Homer's Odyssey, exploring Augusta Webster's 1870 dramatic monologue ‘Circe’ and Madeline Miller's 2018 novel of the same name. In both texts Circe's main motivation is to escape from the island, depicted as an idyllic garden, where she has been exiled by the gods. This escape comes to symbolize movement towards revolutionary feminist change; however, there is no possibility of describing what form the escape will take according to existing discourses, suggesting paradoxically that change can only be represented through a failure of all forms of representation. This poses a difficulty in terms of conceptualizing practical social transformation. Michel Foucault's power-knowledge dialectic and Gilles Deleuze's work on virtuality are deployed here to illustrate how ideas of change and newness can be conceptualized from within the system purporting to be changed. Revolution etymologically suggests a recurring back to an idealized state of nature while simultaneously functioning as an invocation of utopian change and the progressively new. Circe's immortality functions as a symbol for this cultural paralysis but the garden represents a way of thinking beyond it. The garden is a space which purports to control or contain temporal and aesthetic movement. However, in fact this space encourages the risk of change in ways which threaten this control, or at least model how containment could be destabilized. For Circe, the garden is thus a platform from which subjective revolutionary possibilities can be modelled in preparation for application to the material world.

Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne

Reviewed by: Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne Mason Whitehorn Powell (bio) SET AT RANDOM: THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T LIE DOWN, by Declan Dunne. CreateSpace: Self-Published, 2018. 287 pp. $12.00. I would like to know what Declan Dunne set out to say by writing Set at Random. His novel meanders a bit alongside its protagonist, Set Wright, beginning in Pendleton, Texas, during the "'29 cotton-picking season'" (1). This specific seasonal detail, like many others, does not color the novel so much as it hangs undeveloped. Intriguing subject matter and an engaging plot struggle to develop a clear path. What begins as a bildungsroman, where bankers take farmhouses from hapless families, develops into a battle against the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice's attempt to censor James Joyce's Ulysses. Wright relocates to New York City, where he is taken under the wing of an Irish-American family, the Finnegans, and finds himself working for Bennett Cerf and Donald Knopfler of Random House and [End Page 376] their attorney Morris Ernst.1 Thus: Set (works) at Random (House), filing paperwork for the imminent court case—United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—and is eventually sent to Paris to meet with the Joyces and their coterie as the verdict is reached. Dunne's story searches for a sense of purpose and direction without clear realization, which mirrors the nature and execution of its protagonist's journey. Dunne makes it overtly clear that this is a novel of parallelism: if Wright, with his Texas mettle, did not envision the foreclosing banker and artistic censor as one and the same, then his evolution from admitted ignorance to the center of the Joycean controversy by happenstance would not have occurred. "Make sure they're heard—the people they're trying to silence," a mentor says to Wright early in the text in Texas (21). The repetition of circumstance and patterns is not simply a trick in the Ulysses playbook appropriated by Dunne but rather a surface-level theme of which Wright becomes consciously aware, and it consistently pops up in dialogue from beginning to end. Here are examples: "You remind me of Joyce." "Who's she?" [Wright asks, now in New York City]. "James Joyce. His book, Ulysses, takes a lot from Homer's Odyssey. So people read one and refer to the other trying to find connections or where Joyce has reflected the story in Ulysses. That's if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses. You have found, Set, at an early age that life repeats itself in strange ways. I think you might have the mind of an artist." "I don't know about that, Mr. Finnegan. What do you mean, if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses? Is it nearly sold out?" "No," Mr. Finnegan answered. "It's banned." "You mean they won't let him talk?" (42) A question worth asking is whether the novel is more about the battle for publication rights to Joyce's book or the agency of its protagonist's life. Wright seems to be at the mercy of greater cosmic forces that guide him, and whether this is coincidence or randomness, it really is up to the author. If Wright was removed from the world Dunne created, Joyce's novel would become unbanned anyway. His presence, however, highlights the reality of both small and large figures who advocated for Joyce and fought to defend Ulysses. Even if the novel is heavy-handed, it does provide a unique perspective on the ontological divide between reality and fiction: that words and ideas, like people, must be protected when threatened. How Dunne goes about this is not seamless and epic, as in Ulysses, yet the author's prose is clear and his ideas straightforward. The novel is an engaging read if approached with an expectation that it does not shed new light on Joycean scholarship but instead refracts it through the eyes of a boy from Texas on a white-knight mission. [End Page 377] Set at Random lacks the sensuousness, mental entanglement, and iconoclasm that...

НАСЛЕДИЕ ЕВРОПЕЙСКИХ РОМАНТИКОВ И МОТИВ ПУТНИКА В НОЧИ (А. С. ПУШКИН И М. Ю. ЛЕРМОНТОВ)

This article examines European origins of Pushkin's and Lermontov's romantic motif 'wandering in the night' in the works of German and English Romantic poets. The image of the night as an «echo» of the day held an important place in the hierarchy of «universal empathy» in the Romanticist poetic thinking («the light also shines in the night», interpret-ing the biblical text: «and the light shines in darkness, and darkness has not embraced it» (John 1:5). In the famous works by Pushkin and Lermontov, «The Winter Road», «The Possessed», and «I Go Out Alone on the Road...», wander-ing in the night is immersed in an atmosphere of romantic dual reality. The motif of communication in poetic texts is by no means the property of our global communication age alone, but goes back to earlier eras: Antiquity (Homer's Odys-sey), the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (the poetry of Dante and Chaucer), Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism (the poetry of Goethe, Eicheldorf, and Hölderlin). Pushkin's later poem «The Wanderer» (1835) goes back to John Benja-min's poem «The Way of the Pilgrims» (1678). Pushkin's poetic quest of the 1830s turned to the motifs of Salvation and Light, the search for the Right Way (the image of a young man reading a book (the Bible) in «The Wanderer», showing the traveler the Right Way and the narrow gate of Salvation). Lermontov, in his famous nocturne «I go out alone on the road...» (1840s), creates an image of a traveler in the night, which is closely related to the tradition of the German Romantics: Goethe, Eichendorff, and Hölderlin. Pushkin's «night inquiries» in 1830 and 1835 texts, with refer-ences to John Benjamin's English poem and to the Lake School poets W. Wordsworth and R. Southey, are a striking proof of F. M. Dostoyevsky's thoughts on the «universal empathy» of our great poet.

Reception

From Oxford University Press's ‘Classical Presences’ series, Carol Dougherty's Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature places Homer's Odyssey in dialogue with five twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels which all deal in some way with the ideas of home or travel. The author focuses on novels which, on the whole, do not respond overtly to the Odyssey, but which instead share key themes – such as transience, reunion, nostalgia, or family relationships – with the Homeric poem. The conversations which she initiates between the ancient epic and the modern novels inspire us to rethink previously held assumptions about the Odyssey. For example, Dougherty's exploration of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), in which a veteran returns from the First World War with no memory of his wife, prompts her reader to consider Odysseus’ stay with Calypso as ‘a kind of nostalgic amnesia, a necessary break that enables rather than an obstacle that impedes his return’ (111). As ‘an experiment in improvisatory criticism’ (16), this book yields rich rewards for the reader who is already familiar with the Odyssey, as well as for those whose point of entry is one of the five modern novels. The framework applied – in which each chapter presents a reading of a relevant section of the Odyssey before setting out an analysis of the contemporary novel with which it is paired – is perhaps more familiar from comparative literary studies than from classical reception scholarship, yet Dougherty's approach is one which stimulates fresh thought about how we as readers (re-)interpret and ‘receive’ ancient texts based on the contexts in which we encounter them.

El disfraz literario de Loaysa en “El celoso extremeño” de Miguel de Cervantes

In "El celoso extremeño" Miguel de Cervantes depicts Loaysa as a trickster who aspires to uncover what an old man, Felipo de Carrizales, hides in his new well-built Sevilla home. Besides the many interpretations of Loaysa that have placed him in a historical, mythological, or biblical setting, Cervantes's text also offers many clues that identify Loaysa with Orpheus, the musician from Greek mythology. In addition, a detailed and contextualized interpretation of Loaysa also reveals his similarity to the character of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey. This article explores many characteristics of Loaysa such as his disguise as a beggar, his competence as a musician, his ability as a blacksmith, as well as his curiosity, intelligence, and skillful rhetoric in order to provide a new reading of Loaysa which shows his resemblance to Homer's famous character Odysseus.

Joyce’s Prefiguring of “Deconstruction” Theory in “Proteus”

ABSTRACT This paper highlights correspondences between “Proteus” episode from James Joyce’s Ulysses with its reliance on the figure of metamorphosis as a structuring principle and Derrida’s “Deconstruction” not-yet theorized at the time. It details how Joyce pre-figures the theory itself. While Ovid’s Metamorphoses is mentioned in “Oxen of the Sun”, its configurations take place in the third episode of Ulysses which is devoted explicitly and implicitly to change. Everything is subject to othering and displacement: symbols, thoughts, language and of course the Homeric Odyssey. The metamorphosis motif is an adequate space for Joyce to resolve but also to problematize the dialects of present and past, time and space, self and other, presence and absence, signifier and signified and other Western dichotomies. Joyce alludes to the self-contradictory and destabilizing nature of things as well as the differing/deferral of meaning. While the differing and deferral of meaning is characteristic of Joyce’s writings in general, “Proteus” episode by referring to the shapeshifting God, refers explicitly to the practice of transformation and othering within the sameness and thus in a way pre-theorizes “différance” and becomes some sort of metalanguage for deconstruction. Keywords: metamorphosis, deconstruction, othering, differing, deferral.

A Meta-Analytical Comparative Study of ‘Mystical Journey’ in the Persian and the World’s Literature

A Meta-Analytical Comparative Study of ‘Mystical Journey’ in the Persian and the World’s Literature

The Odyssey of Homework During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Working from home has brought a number of changes in the lives, habits and ways of working of many employees. The article analyzes some of these changes starting from a survey conducted at the end of 2020 on a national sample of 554 subjects. The results were grouped on several major topics: resources, changes, advantages/disadvantages, which resulted in three analysis models: CALIPSO, CIRCE and CICLOP. These are the names of famous characters from Homer's Odyssey, and the comparison with them shows that the way back from office work to home work was not without its adventures and consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic produced changes in the attitudes and behaviors of those who experienced work from home in the second half of 2020. The correlations show significant differences between types of employees, such as those between public servants and those in the private sector. or between those with doctoral studies and those with fewer years of schooling © 2021, Amfiteatru Economic. All Rights Reserved.

One Homer, or Two? Some Suggested Stylistic Separators in the Homeric Poems

How many Homers (if any)? This is a question that has bedevilled professional Hellenists since the Alexandrian period. Luckily, such misgivings have not, in general, disquieted students or casual readers, who simply read, study, and enjoy the two lengthy epic poems traditionally ascribed to a composer or, if you lower the date a little, an author, to whom generations have given the name “Homer.” In 1955 the distinguished British Classicist D. L. Page delivered a set of lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, entitled The Homeric Odyssey whose main thesis was that the two epics were composed in separate places ( a fortiori by different authors), independently of each other. My project in the study that follows is to examine more closely the stylistic features called into court by Page to attest to the separateness of the two works in respect of authorship. My ulterior motive is to look for explanations of the discrepancies Page claims to have found on a hypothesis other than separate authorship. Page’s linguistic “separators,” as they might be termed, fall into several categories: dialectal, the words used and especially those with the intensifying prefix ἐρι- “exceedingly”; morphological, e.g. datives plural with the short termination -οις vs. the long -οισι; metrical, the lengthening (or not) of naturally short vowels before mute + liquid or nasal; lexical, words, phrases and formular expressions that are favoured by the Iliad and which might be expected to occur also in the Odyssey but don’t, and vice versa, words and formular phrases found exclusively or predominantly in the Odyssey but which are rare in or totally absent from the Iliad.

Building a Coaching Culture-The Roles of Coaches, Mentors, and Sponsors.

Building a Coaching Culture-The Roles of Coaches, Mentors, and Sponsors.

The homeric Odyssey and the cave as an archetype of rural landscape and first mediterranean habitat

The search for an answer to the question of when the landscape begins, brings us closer to a subject as complex as that of looking for traces of landscape in Homer’s genesic works. From a phenomenological analysis of literary texts, we are forced to draw on such heterogeneous sciences as psychology, painting or geography, to promote a transdisciplinary convergence that helps us in our search for landscape and housing archetypes from attentive and inquisitive readings of the Homeric hexameters and some of the possible objectifications of their places of indeterminacy. We focus on the Odyssey, Homer’s second masterpiece, recited and written at the end of the 8th century BC and considered the germ of Western literature. Such an epic narrative develops complex plots in settings belonging to known and differentiated territories known as “Hellas”. In short, Homeric stories necessarily take place in a “place”, be it real, imaginary or fictitious, of a physical space or vital territory- in which action and daily life will take place. The Poet, as aedo-educator, selects stereotypical natural or cultural spaces of the Mediterranean in order to show archetypes of nature, geography, the polis, and the Mediterranean landscape itself, as an educational and unifying program for the dispersed peoples of Hellas. And the objectifications of that Homeric world, carried out throughout history by different memory repositories, will be the basis for the creation of the West. Here we dare to identify the cave —located on mountainous limestone slopes and facing the sea— with the archetype of the first Mediterranean rural landscape and habitat.

Narrativas longas, o retorno para casa e o prazer literário

Este artigo é fruto de duas conferências sobre literatura realizadas na Secretaria de Fazenda e Planejamento do Estado de São Paulo, como modo de divulgar e fomentar a participação dos servidores no Círculo de Leitura do Estado de São Paulo. Como resultado de rodas de discussão sobre obras selecionadas que compõem o imaginário vulgar e contemporâneo sobre narrativas ditas “épicas”, buscou-se empreender uma análise tendo como eixo o retorno para casa e a busca de si. Escolheu-se três obras, bastante populares, em que esta temática estivesse presente: a Odisseia de Homero, O Senhor dos Anéis de Tolkien e A História Sem Fim de Michael Ende. A partir de discussões sobre o sentido de “retorno para casa”, expresso por meio de narrativas de longa extensão, procurou-se analisar como o simbolismo da “casa” como espaço de “cura” pode ser associado a própria literatura e ao ato de ler, entendidos como fontes de autoconhecimento e de prazer.