SEMINAR PROFILE

H06 -
Odysseus and the Odyssey: The Hero and The Teller of Tales

We can never stop learning from the Odyssey. Our study of the epic welcomes suggestions from the participants about what our focus should be, but begins with the poem's use of and interest in narrative. The Odyssey asks, on the deepest level, whether one can ever go home again, and yet employs a narrative style that never moves backward, but instead maintains a continuous thread from, say, Athena to Zeus to Hermes to Calypso to Odysseus to the Phaiakians to Ithaca. At the same time the poem asks us to consider in what sense the Odysseus who returns is the same as the Odysseus who left 20 years before -- and then also shows us a hero who continually recreates himself through stories, many of which are lies, about who he is. Finally these questions will be considered in light of the oral tradition from which the Homeric epics grew and which, as it was a tradition without writing, must have a sense of "sameness" far more dependent on the spoken word than our own.

Scholar:

Stephanie Nelson

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

2/13/2017, 3/7/2017

H06 -	Odysseus and the Odyssey: The Hero and The Teller of Tales

	We can never stop learning from the Odyssey. Our study of the epic welcomes suggestions from the participants about what our focus should be, but begins with the poem's use of and interest in narrative. The Odyssey asks, on the deepest level, whether one can ever go home again, and yet employs a narrative style that never moves backward, but instead maintains a continuous thread from, say, Athena to Zeus to Hermes to Calypso to Odysseus to the Phaiakians to Ithaca. At the same time the poem asks us to consider in what sense the Odysseus who returns is the same as the Odysseus who left 20 years before -- and then also shows us a hero who continually recreates himself through stories, many of which are lies, about who he is. Finally these questions will be considered in light of the oral tradition from which the Homeric epics grew and which, as it was a tradition without writing, must have a sense of "sameness" far more dependent on the spoken word than our own.

		Scholar:	Stephanie Nelson
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	2/13/2017, 3/7/2017