Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection: Classical Memories/Modern Identities
Autor Michelle Zerbaen Limba Engleză Hardback – feb 2021
Michelle Zerba’s Modern Odysseys explores three major writers in global modernism from the Mediterranean, Anglo-European Britain, and the Caribbean whose groundbreaking literary works have never been studied together before. Using language as an instrument of revolution and social change, C. P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire gave expression to the forms of human experience we now associate with modernity: homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness. More specifically, Zerba argues that Odyssean tropes of diffusion, isolation, passage, and return give form to works by these writers but in ways that invite us to reconsider and revise the basic premises of reception studies and intellectual history. Combining close readings of literary texts with the study of interviews, essays, diaries, and letters, Zerba advances a revisionary account of how to approach relationships between antiquity and modernity. Instead of frontal encounters with the Odyssey, Cavafy, Woolf, and Césaire indirectly—but no less significantly—engage with Homer’s epic poem. In demonstrating how such encounters operate, Modern Odysseys explores issues of race and sexuality that connect antiquity with the modern period.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814214640
ISBN-10: 0814214649
Pagini: 254
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.51 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Classical Memories/Modern Identities
ISBN-10: 0814214649
Pagini: 254
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.51 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Classical Memories/Modern Identities
Recenzii
“With its focus on the soft pre-Homeric tradition as the prehistory of its post-Homeric continuation leading up to the twentieth-century odysseys re-told by Cavafy, Woolf, and Césaire, Michelle Zerba’s study fills a very relevant gap of scholarly research.” —Dieter Fuchs, James Joyce Quarterly
“In addition to being riveting to read, Modern Odysseys offers readers a compelling new framework for thinking about the emergence of counter subjectivities within international modernism and enlivens scholarly debates about the modern afterlives of Homer’s Odyssey. The author’s intellectual flair, theoretical verve, and impressive range all command attention.” —Emily Greenwood, author of Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century
“The book’s distinctiveness and charm are enhanced by the author’s clarity and usefulness. Modern Odysseys makes a valuable intervention in the popular subfield of reception studies within classics.” —Alexander Beecroft, author of Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation
Notă biografică
Michelle Zerba is the Maggie B. Martin Professor of Rhetoric and Classical Studies at Louisiana State University.
Extras
Homer’s epic of wandering is quite obviously in the world, and its avatars are identifiable. Recent work on the Odyssey in cultural history has demonstrated its remarkable resilience and currency across very different places and times. Yet it is also a famously crafty story that prefers to approach its subject circuitously and often keeps us wondering. Its plot, characters, and forms of storytelling are sly. Odysseus is so well known for his “many turns” that Homer has an epithet for that quality—polytropos—and associates it with metis, a kind of mental dexterity revealed in the manipulation of multiple identities, the weaving of tales, and the capacity to act effectively in treacherous conditions. The stories within the epic include cleverly confabulated lies, and the bard identifies them this way, raising questions about the reliability of his own narration. Ingenious detours abound in Homer’s poem, from the delay of the hero’s appearance until Book 5 and the enigmas of his name to the motives of Penelope and the conundrum of slaughtering the suitors. The audience first meets Odysseus through report—disseminated forms of speech whose truth value is questionable. If the third-person narrator is devious, his central character is no less so. The epic is part of an oral-formulaic tradition, but it is also a tale of trickery told in large part by a trickster. In short, the Odyssey invites us to consider not only the story it tells, but the stories it does not tell or tells obliquely. By doing so, it draws us into reflections about lateral forms of storytelling—narratives that move at an angle and through deferrals, covering their tracks, dissimulating sources, and escaping genealogical ties. The techniques associated with such narratives invite an exploration of why tales of wandering are sometimes wandering tales—stories that wind deviously around other stories rather than adapting them or receiving them in direct ways. By calling attention to how the skew in a return voyage is linked with skews in storytelling, Homer presses us to reexamine common assumptions embedded in studies of literary influence and reception, which depend upon notions of how we receive, assimilate, and adapt texts.
This book found its shape in curiosity about journeys that tell it slant. As is often the case with a piece of literature that becomes a companion, I found bearings in works I read alongside it, particularly texts that were coming to the fore in the study of global modernisms. Journey-related motifs emerged as vital in some of these texts, especially those exploring late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century subjectivities taking shape around what we now call homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness. That wasn’t surprising since literary journeys are frequently bound up with passage through strange territory and extreme experiences, but the works toward which I was gravitating were handling this material through roundabout, cunning, and oblique strategies that enabled the writers to speak of forbidden and half-hidden things in poetic forms that were themselves evasive and elusive. In different ways, these were pioneering texts. They did not espouse an ancient heritage or situate themselves in a tradition, as did many modernist writings, but they began to cluster in my readings of them around the Odyssey, loosely linked by a certain isomorphism of form and content. I began thinking of them as modern odysseys—works that traveled through outlying lands and seas, practicing a poetics of indirection and weak links.
This book found its shape in curiosity about journeys that tell it slant. As is often the case with a piece of literature that becomes a companion, I found bearings in works I read alongside it, particularly texts that were coming to the fore in the study of global modernisms. Journey-related motifs emerged as vital in some of these texts, especially those exploring late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century subjectivities taking shape around what we now call homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness. That wasn’t surprising since literary journeys are frequently bound up with passage through strange territory and extreme experiences, but the works toward which I was gravitating were handling this material through roundabout, cunning, and oblique strategies that enabled the writers to speak of forbidden and half-hidden things in poetic forms that were themselves evasive and elusive. In different ways, these were pioneering texts. They did not espouse an ancient heritage or situate themselves in a tradition, as did many modernist writings, but they began to cluster in my readings of them around the Odyssey, loosely linked by a certain isomorphism of form and content. I began thinking of them as modern odysseys—works that traveled through outlying lands and seas, practicing a poetics of indirection and weak links.
Cuprins
Contents Introduction A Poetics of Indirection and Telling It Slant Chapter 1 Diffusion and Mixture Homer: The Odyssey in a Sea of Difference Cavafy: Diaspora, Oblique Encounters, and Homoerotic Desire Césaire: The Colonial Antilles and a Map of One’s Own Spilled Blood Woolf: Tilting at Pagans’ Heads in a House That Is a Town Chapter 2 Islands and Isolation Homer: From Calypso to the Therapy of the Word Cavafy: Cosmopolitan Isolation and Sexual Shaming Woolf: Domestic Katabasis and Moments of Being Césaire: Peléan Eruptions and Portraits of Blood Chapter 3 Passage and Detour Homer: Odysseus’s Wound and Narrative Detours Césaire: Lagoons of Blood and Literary Cannibalism Woolf: Constantinople and Exile as Carnival Cavafy: Mediterranean Routes and Ephebic Visions Chapter 4 Return and Split Endings Homer: Murder in the Home and Split Endings Woolf: Time Warps and Wild Goose Chases Césaire: The Incised Tree, the Slave Ship, and the Pirogue Cavafy: Hedonic Ships on Policed Waters Epilogue Toward an End Bibliography Index
Descriere
Does groundbreaking work on race and gender studies by examining how C. P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire’s modern works intersect with Odyssean tropes.