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

Description

Odyssey brings Homer's together with contemporary literary texts ranging from Rebecca West's to Marilynne Robinson's and Cormac McCarthy's to produce new readings that reframe, reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homer's iconic story of travel and home. While some novels share with the a celebration of the creative process of improvisation to rethink the relationship between home and travel, others draw upon nostalgia - our complicated longing for home - to unsettle the inevitability of return. Rather than offering an explicit retelling of Homer's poem, each of these novels prompts us to revisit the relationship between travel and home that Odysseus and Penelope embody to ask new questions of that well-read text. Does travel reinforce or destabilize our notion of home? Are mobility and domesticity irrevocably gendered, or can we imagine a world in which Penelope travels and Odysseus stays home? Just as Odysseus continually reinvents his own identity with each new encounter, both abroad and at home, so too we, as readers, participate in an improvisatory interpretive experiment of our own. This volume sets out a new model for reading ancient and contemporary texts together - one that challenges the conventional chronological assumptions inherent in many works of classical reception. No longer a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it the same, the , together with the novels with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter. Cover Travel and Home in Homer’s Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns Copyright Acknowledgments Contents Introduction: Critical Encounters I. Odysseus as Improviser II. The Literary Encounter III. The Temporal Encounter IV. Improvised Criticism 1: “More like Odysseus”: Playing House in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient I. Sleeping with Antiquity II. “More like Odysseus” III. Playing House in the Odyssey IV. The Villa San Girolamo: In Near Ruins V. Kip’s Tent: “Half in and half out” VI. “I want to come home” 2: “An end to housekeeping”: Mobility and Domesticity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping I. Should I Stay or Should I Go? II. From Raft to Bed III. Transient Housekeeping IV. House to Ship V. Domestic Mobility VI. House or Home? VII. A Melancholy Story 3: “It’s okay”: Improvisational Housekeeping in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road I. Fathers and Sons II. A World without Houses III. Male Domestics: “It’s okay” IV. Carrying the Fire 4: “This house is different”: Forgetting the Way Home in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier I. What is This Place? II. “This house is different” III. Monkey Island: Homesickness IV. The Return of the Soldier 5: “Come brother. Let’s go home”: Restorative Nostalgia in Toni Morrison’s Home I. Bringing the War Home II. “Far too alive” III. “You are strange” IV. Domestic Ambitions V. Lotus VI. “Come brother. Let’s go home” Conclusion: Nostalgic Returns I. New Worlds, New Readings II. Phaeacia and the “Double-Exposure” of Nostalgia III. Polytropic Nostalgia, or Returning Home to Homer Bibliography Index