The Choice of Odysseus

The Choice of Odysseus PDF Author: Sarah Van der Laan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198778295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics for their age. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton to recover a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic.

The Choice of Odysseus

The Choice of Odysseus PDF Author: Sarah Van der Laan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198778295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics for their age. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton to recover a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic.

The Choice of Odysseus

The Choice of Odysseus PDF Author: Sarah Van der Laan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192524267
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.

The Odyssey of Political Theory

The Odyssey of Political Theory PDF Author: Patrick J. Deneen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847696239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This path-breaking and eloquent analysis of The Odyssey, and the way it has been interpreted by political philosophers throughout the centuries, has dramatic implications for the current state of political thought. This important book offers readers original insights into The Odyssey and it provides a new understanding of the classic works of Plato, Rousseau, Vico, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Through his analysis Patrick J. Deneen requires readers to rethink the issues that are truly at the heart of our contemporary 'Culture Wars, ' and he encourages us to reassess our assumptions about the Western canon's virtues or viciousness. Deneen's penetrating exploration of Odysseus's and our own enduring battles between the dual temptations of homecoming and exploration, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and relativism and universality provides an original perspective on contentious debates at the center of modern political theory and philosophy

The If Odyssey

The If Odyssey PDF Author: Peter Worley
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441174958
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Using Homer's epic tales as inspiration, this book offers teachers session plans and storytelling tips to facilitate philosophical discussions with children aged 9-14.

Untangling Heroism

Untangling Heroism PDF Author: Ari Kohen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317964578
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The idea of heroism has become thoroughly muddled today. In contemporary society, any behavior that seems distinctly difficult or unusually impressive is classified as heroic: everyone from firefighters to foster fathers to freedom fighters are our heroes. But what motivates these people to act heroically and what prevents other people from being heroes? In our culture today, what makes one sort of hero appear more heroic than another sort? In order to answer these questions, Ari Kohen turns to classical conceptions of the hero to explain the confusion and to highlight the ways in which distinct heroic categories can be useful at different times. Untangling Heroism argues for the existence of three categories of heroism that can be traced back to the earliest Western literature – the epic poetry of Homer and the dialogues of Plato – and that are complex enough to resonate with us and assist us in thinking about heroism today. Kohen carefully examines the Homeric heroes Achilles and Odysseus and Plato’s Socrates, and then compares the three to each other. He makes clear how and why it is that the other-regarding hero, Socrates, supplanted the battlefield hero, Achilles, and the suffering hero, Odysseus. Finally, he explores in detail four cases of contemporary heroism that highlight Plato’s success. Kohen states that in a post-Socratic world, we have chosen to place a premium on heroes who make other-regarding choices over self-interested ones. He argues that when humans face the fact of their mortality, they are able to think most clearly about the sort of life they want to have lived, and only in doing that does heroic action become a possibility. Kohen’s careful analysis and rethinking of the heroism concept will be relevant to scholars across the disciplines of political science, philosophy, literature, and classics.

The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey

The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey PDF Author: Alexander C. Loney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190909692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book is the first in-depth examination of revenge in the Odyssey. The principal revenge plot of the Odyssey --Odysseus' surprise return to Ithaca after twenty away and his vengeance on Penelope's suitors -- is the act for which he is most celebrated. This story forms the backbone of the Odyssey. But is Odysseus' triumph over the suitors as univocally celebratory as is often assumed? Does the poem contain and even suggest other, darker interpretations of Odysseus' greatest achievement? This book offers a careful analysis of several other revenge plots in the Odyssey -- those of Orestes, Poseidon, Zeus, and the suitors' relatives. It shows how these revenge stories color one another with allusions (explicit and implicit) that connect them and invite audiences to interpret them in light of one another. These stories -- especially Odysseus' revenge upon the suitors -- inevitably turn out to have multiple meanings. One plot of revenge slips into another as the offender in one story becomes a victim to be avenged in the next. As a result, Odysseus turns out to be a much more ambivalent hero than has been commonly accepted. And in the Odyssey's portrayal, revenge is an unstable foundation for a community. Revenge also ends up being a tenuous narrative structure for an epic poem, as a natural end to cycles of vengeance proves elusive. This book offers a radical new reading of the seemingly happy ending of the poem.

Live unnoticed

Live unnoticed PDF Author: Geert Roskam
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047430956
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book casts new light on Epicurus' famous ideal of an 'unnoticed life' (lathe biosas). It also shows how this ideal was received during the later history of Epicureanism and how it occasionally occurs in ancient Latin poetry.

Reading the Odyssey

Reading the Odyssey PDF Author: Seth L. Schein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121414X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This wide-ranging collection makes available to specialists and nonspecialists alike important critical work on the Odyssey produced during the last half century. The ten essays address five major concerns: the poem's programmatic representation of social and religious institutions and values; its transformation of folktales and traditional stories into epic adventures; its representation of gender roles and, in particular, of Penelope; its narrative strategies and form; and its relation to the Iliad, especially to that epic's distinctive conception of heroism. In the introduction, Seth L. Schein describes the poetic background to the work and suggests a variety of interpretive approaches, some of which are developed in the essays that follow. These essays include previously published work by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Pietro Pucci, and Charles P. Segal. There also are a new essay by Laura M. Slatkin, two revised and expanded ones by Nancy Felson-Rubin and Michael N. Nagler, and three appearing in English for the first time by Uvo Hlscher, Karl Reinhardt, and Vernant. The result is a collection that juxtaposes older, often hard-to-find articles with significant newer pieces in a way that allows for a fruitful dialogue among them.

From Villain to Hero

From Villain to Hero PDF Author: Silvia Montiglio
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Odysseus as a model of wisdom in Greek and Roman philosophy

Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil

Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil PDF Author: Peter J. Heslin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192524305
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This volume offers a strikingly innovative account of Propertius' relationship with Virgil, positing a keen rivalry between two of the greatest poets of Latin literature, contemporaries within the circle of Maecenas. It begins by examining all of the references to Greek mythology in Propertius' first book; these passages emerge as strongly intertextual in nature, providing a way for the poet to situate himself with respect to his predecessors, both Greek and Roman. More specifically, myth is also the medium of a sustained polemic with Virgil's Eclogues, published only a few years earlier. Virgil's response can be traced in the Georgics, and subsequently, in his second and third books, Propertius continued to use mythology and its relationship to contemporary events as a vehicle for literary polemic. This volume argues that their competition can be seen as exemplifying a revised model for how the poets within Maecenas' circle interacted and engaged with each other's work - a model based on rivalry rather than ideological adhesion or subversion - while also painting a revealing picture of how Virgil was viewed by a contemporary in the days before his death had canonized his work as an instant classic. In particular, its novel interpretation offers us a new understanding of Propertius, one of the foundational figures in Western love poetry, and how his frequent references to other poets, especially Gallus and Ennius, take on new meanings when interpreted as responses to Virgil's changing career.