Modern Odysseys: A Panel Discussion

[0:18] Okay, welcome and good evening here in the US, good afternoon, if you're in California and if you're joining us from the UK or the European continent thank you so much for staying up so late to join us. I'm Richard Armstrong of the University of Houston, and I'll be the moderator of today's webinar, sponsored by the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. And we wish especially to thank Lanah Koelle and Allie Marbry for their wonderful assistance in helping us get this together. This will be a two hour discussion of Michelle Zerba's new book, Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Cesaire, and a Poetics of Indirection, a discussion with the author herself, and some colleagues eager to join in.

[0:58] In a moment, I will introduce Professor Zerba in more detail, but let me first introduce our fellow participants. With me here in Houston is Casey Dua, professor of classical studies at the University of Houston, author of several books on Greek epic and tragedy, and a longtime leader and collaborator on the Homer Multi-Texts project, which is going to be of direct relevance for our discussion today. In the United Kingdom, we have Laura Jansen. Senior lecturer in classics and comparative literature at the University of Bristol, author of several books dealing with matters of reception on figures like Anne Carson and Jorge Luis Borges.

[1:29] And a main editor of an exciting series on classical receptions in the 20th century writing with Bloomsbury. Also the United Kingdom is Adam Lecznar, honorary fellow, research fellow, at the University College London. Author of a recent monograph on Dionysus after Nietzsche with Cambridge University press, and accorded volume on classicisms in the Black Atlantic, various other essays on classical reception, including work on Aime Cesaire. And last, but certainly not least Patrice Rankine, professor of classics at my Alma Mater at the University of Chicago, author of Aristotle in Black Drama: a Theater of Black Civil Disobedience, Ulysses in Blank.

[2:06] Uh, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Ellison: Classicism in African-American Literature, and co-editor of the Oxford handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, and many other studies in reception. Now you've just heard me mentioned the word reception several times here. And this lies at the center of today's discussion. Over the past 25 years, we've seen an astounding transformation in the field of classical studies as what was once called the classical tradition has morphed into a plural classical receptions, a provocatively termed post classicism, an interest in deep classics and increasingly a focus on global classics, or the repositioning of ancient culture in line with world cultures and literatures.

[2:45] Michelle Zerba's book is a vital contribution to this ongoing discussion. And in a moment, she herself will briefly lay out the book's argument and strategy of reading Homer, Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, Aime Cesaire, according to a poetics of indirection, as she puts it. Along with Alan Miller, I'm co-editor at the Ohio State University press for the series, Classical Memories, Modern Identities, which published this book. And from the start I have to say, we were very excited about the direction it takes. We feel these discussions are crucial to the future of our profession, and we'd like you to be a part of it through posing questions via the webinar.

[3:18] By coincidence also, our series is launching online a symposium today on another book in the series, Mario Tello's Archive Feelings, a Theory of Greek Tragedy, where five scholars have submitted their written responses that will be published in the coming weeks, starting today on syndicate.network. Now, after Professor Zerba about outlines the gist of the book, each one of our participants will lead a part of our discussion for about 5-10 minutes. And then we'll go through each one of us, uh, and circle back to Michelle and we will continue then this general discussion.

[3:49] So feel free to send your questions to us here through the webinar chat, and we'll try to work them in as we can. Back to our author, Michelle Zerba is the Maggie B. Martin professor of rhetoric and classical studies at Louisiana State University and has a split appointment in the departments of English and world languages and literature. Her research and teaching span the fields of Greek and Roman literature, philosophy and rhetoric, Renaissance drama, and political theory in classical reception. She is especially interested in questions that emerge at the intersection of antiquity and modernity.

[4:19] She held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Partnership University Fund of the French government, and the American Association of University Women. Her publications include Tragedy and Theory with Princeton University Press, Doubt in the Politics of, sorry, Doubt in Skepticism in Antiquity in the Renaissance with Cambridge University Press. This book, Modern Odysseys and, uh, the Norton Critical edition of Aristotle's Poetics. She's currently also writing a book, entitled The Origins of Mystery: a Cultural History of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

[4:50] So now I'll turn it over to Michelle Zerba. Okay, thank you very much, Richard, for that generous and warm introduction. And thank you audience members for making time in your busy schedules to join us today. Um, I want to thank the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies for hosting this event. Uh, I'm very honored to be a part of it. Um, I also want to thank the editor of the Ohio State University Press Ana Jimenez Moreno, who I think may be with us today.

[5:22] Uh, she's the one who sought out the manuscript that became the book that we're going to be talking about. But in particular, I want to thank Richard Armstrong and Paul Miller, who are the co-editors of the Classical Memories, Modern Identities series. Richard in particular has been an extremely supportive editor and colleague over the past couple of years. And I'm very much grateful to him. Um, finally, but not least. I want to thank the distinguished panelists who are joining us today, especially those of you who, um, are in England at 10 o'clock at night.

[5:58] Uh, your work has been very inspirational to me and I'm hoping that our discussion today can open new doors of inquiry. I'm going to now shift to a screenshare PowerPoint. So let me do this and can you all see this? Yes. Are we good? Yes. All right. In 1900 sponge divers off the coast of the island of Antikythera in the Southern Aegean discovered an underwater shipwreck, the remains of a Greek cargo ship dating from the second half of the first century BCE.

[6:47] Excavations at the site extended over most of the 20th century and into the 21st century as these photos suggest. Um, and in 1912 or in rather 2012, when this photograph on the, on the right was taken, there was still a trove of earthen ware jars that had not yet been pulled from the deep. Now among the many valuable artifacts that were refuge-that were rescued from this site, the most famous one is what is, uh, come to be referred to as the Antikythera mechanism.

[7:24] This is an ingenious, mathematical and astronomical device that has drawn wide attention. And it's often been referred to as the world's first analog computer. It's drawn wide attention and efforts to reconstruct how it might've worked are contained in these images on the right of the slide. But in addition to the Antikythera mechanism, this unusual statue was pulled up from the deep and it's been identified as Odysseus.

[8:00] This barnacled and battered statue looks every bit, um, like the wiley man of much suffering that we meet in Homer's epic. Uh, he's missing two hands and a leg. Um, and he is vital to the talk that I'm giving today for reasons that I will now say a few things about. The, uh, the Antikythera, uh, Odysseus as he called, was the center of a, uh, an exhibition held at the National Archeological Museum in Athens in 2016 called Odysseys.

[8:39] This, um, this Antikythera Odysseus was one among numerous artifacts that were, um, established in the halls, the rooms of where the exhibition took place. Most of the, the remains I should say of the Antikythera find are in fact housed at the National Archeological Museum in Athens, but he was one of many artifacts featured in the exhibit drawn from across the centuries in rooms on whose walls were projected fragments of modern Greek poetry by C.P.

[9:16] Cavafy, George Seferis, Yiannis Ritsos, and Odysseas Elytis. Lyrical music was piped into the halls by Vangelis Papathanassiou. Evoking the bittersweet vicissitudes of long journeys and broken home comings. Now I bring up this exhibit because it inspired my book. It didn't inspire the inception of the book, but it inspired the organization of the book.

[9:48] The curity, the curators of this exhibit by surrounding the Odysseus statue with artifacts from other journeys and other histories in later times invited the viewer to make associations that were suggestive, resonant, oblique, and that were elicited as much by absence as by presence. As much by what could be seen as what had to be imagined.

[10:22] This form of organization, I thought could be put to work in devising a framework for a critical approach to the poem, the Odyssey. And this is what I needed at the time that I visited the exhibition. I was working with an ensemble of literary works that had only soft connections with Homer's poem. Literary works that ultimately ended up in the pages of my book. Now the exhibits struck up other thoughts.

[10:57] I've long been fascinated by the fact that homecoming and the epic-what, Homer calls "nostos" is neither a stable center in the poem, nor does Odysseus approach it directly. The Odyssey enacts homecoming obliquely, through a long circuitous journey and even one arriving on Ithaca, Odysseus must wander circuitously in his own house.

[11:29] The Odyssey is structured around delays, deferrals and postponements. This has been a topic of longstanding interest in scholarship, and it extends back to the ancient skolia. A few of the most famous delays are that the hero appears center stage in the poem only after four books in which he is seen laterally from competing perspectives. Upon arrival in Ithaca, he repeatedly poses as a Creten and he tells false tales about who he is, where he comes from and what he suffered.

[12:10] When he finally is unmasked he has to depart Ithaca immediately again for a second journey. An inland journey that is going to take him to a place where people don't know the sea and who thinks that the oar that he's carrying in his hands is a winnowing fan. So the iconic image, I think in the poem of this, uh, kind of these strategies of delay and deferral is Penelope herself, who's weaving and unweaving is famous.

[12:46] In the image that I present you with on this slide by Dora Wheeler, you can see, well, first of all, let me say that Wheeler has decided not to paint Penelope, but to weave her. This is a silk embroidered cloth that shows Penelope weaving or unweaving by night, what she weaves by day. And I want you to note something about her position that is very common in Penelope art. And that is that she's seen obliquely from the side.

[13:20] Now the circuitousness of nostos is closely linked in the poem with the circuitous of metis, of cunning, which is Odysseus's key key character trait, as it is a key character trait of Penelope. And metis, or cunning, is a form of practical intelligence that goes about solutions to problems in a wiley, angled, and oblique way. Together they convey the sense in the poem that truth is a crooked thing that has trouble circulating in the open air.

[14:00] This crookedness, this sideways fashion of coming at things seems built into Homeric storytelling itself in the Odyssey. In fact, the Odyssey is often talked about as meta-poetic because it looks to its own characters to reflect upon its own ways of telling stories and making sense. The effect of this crookedness in the Odyssey is that the poem seems to interfere deliberately with its own homecoming.

[14:39] Why is this, what kinds of truths wander? Now these questions seem to me bound up with very fundamental issues in the Odyssey. They reflected conflicts in the emergence of personal and collective identities in the poem. They point to fractures and splits not only in the human subject, but in the basic social units of family and state.

[15:11] They spoke to the ravages of war, the fragility of the psyche under pressure, and also to the resources of trickster figures: Odysseus. Now none of these were new insights into the Odyssey, but I wanted to approach them in ways that had not yet been attempted. I was trying in particular to develop a critical vocabulary and ways of thinking about obliqueness-of way-of indirection, of ways of telling it slant.

[15:47] I was trying to develop this kind of vocabulary in order to respect the ways in which the poem invites us to talk about this. And what I learned very early on in this enterprise is that in the process of trying to create a critical vocabulary to talk about, um, the wileyness and the indirection of the Odyssey, I was continuously going against the grain of concepts of tradition and influence, which brand much of what is called now reception studies.

[16:24] It also tapped in my own efforts also tapped into recent efforts by others in the field who were working along similar lines, and imagining projects like deep classics, post classicisms, peripheral classics, tangential classics. Now for me, the pressure that was being exerted on my project came from the literary works that I was studying in relationship to the Odyssey.

[16:55] C.P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, Aime Cesaire. These were writers from very different parts of the globe, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Anglo European Britain, and the works that I was studying deeply resonated with the Odyssey without directly engaging it. These writers are often gathered under the rubric of international or global modernism, and they each in their different ways tracked uncommon journeys, arising from homoerotic desire in the case of Cavafy.

[17:38] Of non-normative sexualities in the case of Woolf, and of racial consciousness in the, in the case of Cesaire. Journeys that had yet to make their way into literary expression. Now I was drawing them together because they enabled the study of emergent counter subjectivities in the early 20th century that have continued to shape our ideas about modernity.

[18:09] We are still very much struggling to create languages and ways of thinking that will allow us to think about and discuss what was then abhorrent, marginal, wayward. Cavafy's poetry covered a wide swath of historical subjects, and he in fact called himself often a historical poet. These subjects were drawn not from the classical Greece of the European enlightenment, but from the worlds of late antiquity, Byzantium, and the diasporic populations of the Lavant.

[18:52] Cavafy wrote a great many poems of erotic encounters along the sometimes brand, but often tattered by ways of minor Asian kingdoms, of Eastern Mediterranean towns with mixed populations and in city ghettos. Here, secretive, erotic touches and passing glances, brought moments of rare epiphany. On the slide I present you with some sketches by David Hockney, that he prepared for a translation of a book called 14 Poems by Cavafy.

[19:34] And Hockney himself used Cavafy's itinerant poems to explore his own homosexual encounters. Homoeroticism and diaspora are deeply linked in this Mediterranean writing. Cavafy favors a style of indirection and slant telling not only because his subjects were at the time censored, but because of the power he discovered in suggestiveness and of things half-hidden.

[20:10] He adopts a deliberate skew in steering clear of subjects associated with the grandeur of classical Greece. There are some exceptions to this, and we can talk about them in the Q & A. Cavafy's friend, Ian Forster, once characterized him as "a man standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." In Orlando, Virginia Woolf gives us a romp through the centuries and across continents in a figure who lives 350 years, aging only 36 years in the process, and who go through a mysterious sex change in Constantinople, the ancient Byzantium, the modern Istanbul.

[20:59] Woolf's work is subtitled "A Biography", but it's a fictional biography, sort of. Because Orlando is oblique in every sense, since it presents a radically sideways attempt to address her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, who is presented to you in these photographs that are to the right. Woolf satirizes most of British literary history, while staying clear of classical models and disavowing traditional genres.

[21:36] She speaks in Orlando of the phantasmagoria of the mind, and she talks about it as a meeting place of dissemblables. A constant welter of thoughts, feelings, and desires that don't allow direct frontal treatment. And of course she's famous for her experimental ways of going about this in works outside of Orlando. Woolf finds in slantness the strategies she seeks in capturing the polymorphous selves that constitutes sex and gender.

[22:14] One has a sense in reading her work of sailing through a dense sea of tangential literary encounters that are radically de-centered and that cohere, but only tenuously in her luminous poetic prose. A few comments on the photographs to the right, they are indeed of Vita Sackville-West, but you'll notice in the captions she's identified as Orlando. Virginia had in fact, planned, on taking photographs of this sort and including them in Orlando from the beginning.

[22:51] And she had convinced Vita to sit for these photographs, a proposition that Vita was not comfortable with. Most of the photographs were taken by Vanessa Bell, Virginia's sister. Vita, resistant to the idea, nonetheless acquiesced, but she complained in letters to Virginia, that she felt like one of those wax figures in a shop window in which you hang clothes and jewels,, a mannequin in other words. These photos, bear witness, however, to the blurriness of boundaries between truth and fiction, the real and the imagined, history and confabulation, or what Woolf calls "granite and rainbow" in one of her essays.

[23:41] Cesaire descends into the cauldron of slavery and colonialism in "Journal of a Return To The Native Land" and he's the first Caribbean writer to do so. He struggles to conjure up through the imagination what has been swallowed in the abyss of the African slave trade. This is experienced in the poem as a zone of opacity and of submarine hauntings. Cesaire essays or attempts strategies for piecing together the memory of an experience that exists only in fragments.

[24:21] His moves are not direct, but oblique, circuitous, and often implicated in approach and avoidance. He was deeply steeped in the Western tradition and particularly in Greek and Latin, since he took a higher degree at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris. But his work often though, not always eludes Western literary forms. So attempting to fit him into standard models of source and derivation, prototype and copy, can not only be critically obtuse, but even offensive.

[24:59] Given the radical character of the poetic project, which is to decolonialize the Caribbean mind. The drawing on the left here is by Pablo Picasso. And it is-- was included in a volume of Cesaire's poetry called "Corps Perdu", or Lost Body published in 1950. It was also used though, for the poster that circulated to advertise the first International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, which was held in Paris in 1956.

[25:38] The middle image here is from the famous Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. It's often included in volumes on Negritude, a concept that Cesaire helped forge and that we can talk about in the Q & A. And the image on the right here is one of the under water sculptures that are located off the coast of Grenada just off the coast of Venezuela by Jason deCaires Taylor, haunting images of what lies at the bottom of the Caribbean.

[26:14] So what I was talking about in the book were lowercase odysseys that practice a poetics of indirection, and that don't originate in the Odyssey or approach it as a prototype. It might help to think in terms of a comparison here. Joyce's "Ulysseys", Pound's "Cantos", H.D.'s "Helen in Egypt", and Kazantzakis' "Odyssey: A Sequel", these are famous works in classical modernism that directly engage with the ancient poem and they invite a critical idiom of tradition, influence and adaptation as those concepts have been deployed in mainstream reception studies.

[27:03] All of these works, I should say, had been treated brilliantly in recent criticism and without that work, this book that I wrote would never have been possible. But in configuring Cavafy, Woolf, and Cesaire, I was trying to bring other forms of relation into view. Rather than embracing influence and adaptation, these writers with some important exceptions, often elluded direct encounters with origins and ancient canonical texts.

[27:38] And so they called for approaches that respected the gestures they were enacting that were in tune with ways of telling it's slant. So "Modern Odysseys" is a contribution to the disarticulation of basic concepts of classical influence and reception. Some of the strategies I use are listed on this slide. I tried to treat the Odyssey, not as an Ur-text, as a font or as a source, but rather as a multiform.

[28:14] As a tale that was told in many different ways already in antiquity. In a living oral tradition we no longer have access to accept and trace elements. Some of those traces in the Odyssey itself. The Homer MultiText project, which many of you know about and which Casey we'll talk about in a few minutes, was an enormous help to me in conceptualizing and theorizing the consequences of a multiform Homer.

[28:47] It demonstrates in uncanny ways, the Homer MultiText project, how the ancient oral and contemporary digital realms are converging. I also developed four loosely configured tropes for this project. Tropes in the basic sense of leanings, turns, tendencies that captured aspects of journeys. These tropes were only loosely Homeric.

[29:18] They weren't drawn from Homeric scholarship, though I had thought about Homeric scholarship in shaping them; they were not authored by Homer. These are elements of a critical construct that I had to put together and I drew them eclectically across the range of poetry and fiction. One of the things I've resisted in the book was author-dominated chapters. So I tried not to write a book that had chapters on Homer and Cavafy, Homer and Cesaire, Homer and Woolf.

[29:52] Instead, what I tried to do was to organize units with multiples, and I worked toward an essayistic style of composition, often using techniques of collage and juxtaposition in order to draw out what it means to work along the lines of weak links. So I'm going to tail off right now with this last slide in which I give you the table of contents of my book so that you can kind of see some of the challenges I was engaged with.

[30:26] I did keep to an organization of chapters. This was mostly because my editors has told me I had to. "Books don't sell without chapters", they said, so I kept chapters, but I organized them around the four tropes of diffusion and mixture, islands and isolation, passage and detour, return and split endings. I did lead with essays of Homer. And even though I was trying to deauthorize in a sense, detextualize, how we might go about the study of literature in this new way, I kept to authors whom I named in the introduction, because I wanted to make the book user-friendly enough for people who wanted to just tap into Cavafy or just into Cesaire.

[31:14] They could consult the chapters in the book in order to find out how to do that. So you can't entirely escape the strictures that you're trying to in going about this kind of project. But I wanted you to see some of the ways in which I attempted to work with the concepts of indirection. And there I'm going to stop sharing and move back to the gallery view here and either back to Richard, or to Casey, who I think is next in the line of those who are going to speak to the project.

[31:48] That's right. We're going to go now, for a brief set of responses from people, who are especially situated with particular aspects of your book. And we'll begin with my colleague, Casey Due here at Houston in response, especially to the Odyssey. Okay, great. Can everybody hear me and see my slides, I hope? Actually I'm going to press play to make sure that works. Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much, Michelle, for inviting me.

[32:20] I mean, even just in your talk just now, I'm learning so much. And you know, even though I've been working on the Homer MultiText or thinking about it, conceptualizing it over more than 20 years, I always tell people we really are just getting started. We really just kind of laid the groundwork and then for more work to be done and you're wanting the implications and working with it. And so, I'm just so thrilled to hear everything you're saying.

[32:51] So let me be brief, but whenever, whenever I try to make sense of the Homeric epics as a multiform, poetic tradition. I go back to, the concept of antiquity and, and fluidity. I try to explain that these, this is a, this is a dynamic tradition, but it's also, it is traditional and that's hard-- that's hard to conceptualize. But in thinking about the, the, the, the antiquity, I, I always go back to, you know, this Fresco from the Bronze age site of Pylos.

[33:27] So we're, you know, nearly a thousand years before anything like text fixation of the Illiad and the Odyssey. And we see, I like to imagine something like an epic poet, performing an epic song, maybe something like the Iliad or the Odyssey. And clearly the artist has envisioned the song as, a bird. And it makes me think of course of that famous, traditional formulaic phrase of "winged words" that you see again and again throughout the epic poems.

[33:58] That's not the only example. We also have this late Minoan Pyxis, showing a musician, maybe an epic poet, and, and the song seems to be conceptualized as birds. And I just show these just to, to again, emphasize antiquity, but also fluidity that the song is conceived of as being in flight. It's something that once is spoken, it flies. It's not pinned down, it's not, rigid. It is, it is dynamic.

[34:29] And in making the Homer MultiTexts, we were very, influenced by, by the work of Mullen Perry and Albert Lord, but especially Albert Lord's, talk of the word multiform. He, he, he writes that "the word multi-form is more accurate than 'variant' because it does not give preference or precedence to any one word or set of words to express an idea; instead it acknowledges that the idea may exist in several forms." So I think this ties in with Michelle's work very well.

[35:00] There's not an or text a-- and everything that derives from it. But instead, there-- it's a multi-form tradition. There are instantiations of the Odyssey, instantiations of the Iliad, but there's not one single text from which everything else varies. Unfortunately, you know, that understanding of the epic tradition it goes against everything you learn in graduate school when you're being taught how to work with ancient texts, right?

[35:31] Because they, the, the goal of many classists has been to establish the text. Make the text, and then, you know, establish it as, as the correct text and everything else is just you know, what you put at the very bottom of the page to show what you made the text from. Right. But, but it implies that there's a correct text and everything else is just, you know, ancillary. So I, I'm trying to, you know, show that the reality of the transmission, especially of the Iliad is way more complicated, than that.

[36:08] And, that, we have to take a multi textual approach to, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And this slide of the so-called Benetus A from the 10th century AD is, already, it's a multi-form document. It's the oldest quote unquote, complete text of the Iliad. And yet it's full of multi-formity, between the lines, inner margins, outer margins, the main body of skolia, there are so many different, discussions of other ways to go with the text.

[36:38] Right. And, and so when I say, take a multi text approach to Homeric epic is that I don't make my interpretations or my scholarship based on the idea that there is one text that a guy wrote, but rather many instantiations of the texts that were known in different times in different places. So, and just to sum up, it's more appropriate to speak of, multi forms rather than an Ur text and variant, and it's more appropriate to consider each transmitted Odyssey and Iliad that we encounter as instantiations of a notional text that is somehow both traditional fluid.

[37:19] Oh, Richard's telling me by texts that I cut out a bit, but am I still, am I there now? Can you hear me now? Okay, good. Sorry about that. You can always ask questions later. Oh wait, no, I'm going to, I'm going to stay with the Venetus A. Now, Michelle talks in her book beautifully about the Cretan lies. And I often like to talk about them too, as examples of, not only multformity, because Odysseus tells tales, that could be Odysseys.

[37:55] But also, show awareness of multiformity. In other words, the Odyssey knows that it's multiform. And, of course we see that even from the opening lines, with Odysseus and his signature, epithet, Polutropos, he can turn into many different things, he's a chameleon, he's had many turns, you know, he's multi-form, basically, is what is what Polutropos is telling us. But Crete in, in these Cretan lies kind of symbolizes, that idea of multi formity and indirection.

[38:29] Of course, Crete has a long history of being associated with, alternatives, alternative stories. There's the parable, I mean, the, what do you call that, that, that, that, that typical phrase," all Cretans are liars". But then, you know, in addition to the being associated with, with alternative poetics and different ways of telling the story, other versions, Crete is associated with alternative warfare, with ambush, with special ops, right.

[39:02] And, of course that's all dominated by Métis. So Odysseus' signature trait of Metis, of cunning intelligence, , is associated with Crete in the Iliad, the, the heroes from Crete, Idomeneus and Meriones are the ones that give us our fullest description of, of ambush as the place where, you know, the bravery of men is most on show. The audience of these epics is also very much aware of the multi formity of epic and when, a great example of that, is, is, I think, you know, is, is in the Cretan lies on, and, the one that, Odysseus tells Eumaeus where he talks about how they got an , how they set up an ambush before Troy one night.

[39:51] So he tells this story to Eumaeus and he talks about how he was so cold, that he, he would get, he, he told, he, he tricked someone basically into, running back to the ships. And so he gets, he gets their cloak, right? He gets the cloak of the soldier who ran back to the ships. But, the audience, of course, Eumaeus doesn't, in theory, know that this is Odysseus, he's still in disguise.

[40:23] But in book 10 of the Iliad, which is a book in which ambush occurs and night raids, all the heroes, or their clothing is elaborately described as they go out into the night for this first assembly in the night. And the only one who doesn't have a cloak is Odysseus. So there's this whole thing with cloaks and, and, and, and deception and disguise and revelation and Odysseus is of course, you know, signaling who he is. And certainly the audience would know.

[40:55] But, and, and, and interesting but it's an interesting extra layer to this whole dynamic that, in this particular lie, we have an illusion to Iliad 10 to the Doloneia, the, the, the book in which Diomedes and Odysseus go on a night raid and ended up ambushing Rhesus and, and his men. So, of course, This book, is, was, I think mentioned maybe before, maybe it was before everyone arrived, but we were talking about this book as one that explores the poetics of ambush or a book I wrote with my colleague, Mary Ebbott I should say, about the Doloneia.

[41:36] It explores the poetics of, of, of ambush or Lacoste Lacoste. And the poetics of ambush are basically, you know, ambush is an oblique or indirect approach to warfare, right? When you can't do the full on assault, when the regular battle where you, you know, throw everything you have at the walls isn't working after 10 years, what do you gotta do? You gotta try something else. You gotta try an indirect approach. And of course, Troy only falls by the indirect approach, the, the wooden horse.

[42:09] So book 10 is our book that's full of indirection and, and, and, and poetics of alternative and the poetics of Metis. It shares a lot of formulaic language with the Odyssey. And so it's, it's very interesting that, even in antiquity or, you know, there was suspicion that maybe this book doesn't belong in the Iliad, Iliad 10, I mean. And so, here's the skolion, on Iliad 10 from the Townley manuscript, "They say that this epic composition was arranged separately by Homer," still by Homer, but not to be part of the Iliad and" it was arranged into that poem by Peisistratos."

[42:51] So, I don't want to say a lot about that, but just to indicate that even in antiquity, there was, a suspicion that somehow the Iliad 10 is, is different. It's it's Odyssey like, and it should not, maybe it doesn't match the rest of the Iliad, but, of course I have theories about why that is. Okay. There's a few things just very quickly. I'm going to be wrapping up that a lot of these ideas, were starting to be were articulated, even in the eighties, by, by Cerquiglini and in his book, you know, Eloge de la variante In Praise of the Variant.

[43:34] And, I just, at one point in that book, he, he, quotes, Ramon Menendez Pidal. And he says, he says in the book that "the epic genre exists only in variants." But if you go look up the actual quote, you know, it's not, he doesn't get it exactly right, but it's close enough. Right. And it's, the variant is not a fortuitous and adverse accident, but the normal way of life of the ballad. In other words, you know, a tradition like this is meant to be multiform.

[44:10] It was always going to be multiform. And so to the big question is how do we grapple with the poetics of a multi-form oral tradition? And I will stop here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Again, just to note on format, we're going to have a few of these brief presentations by our discussants, and then move on to responses by Michelle. And again, if you do have questions, there's a special Q and A feature in this webinar that you should notice, please, if you'll put your questions there, we'll try to get to them simply because the chat also is, dealing with other issues.

[44:52] Now as a courteous courtesy, especially for staying up so late Laura Jansen, will make her a statement and, and then we'll move on. When you get back to me, you know, we're, we're getting close to being done. Great. Thank you very much for your introduction and thank you very much for inviting me here tonight. And thank you, Michelle, for your wonderful book. So in preparing for my comments, I spent quite a bit of time pondering, not the conjunction of Homer, or especially after everything we've heard to the idea of Homer or the poet that we call Homer and Virginia Woolf, one of the three modernist authors that Michelle Zerba considers in her compelling book.

[45:40] I was wondering how to reflect on the remarkable politics of indirection that Michelle tracks in the polyvalent, deep time structures of the Odyssey and Orlando specifically in terms of two interrelated areas of interpretation guiding her study. The first sees her rethinking of how to approach the relationship between antiquity and modernity above all when encounters between ancient and modern authors and texts are, as Michelle puts it, not frontal, but oblique as well as sustained through a network that maps out markedly different dynamics of reading the two texts side by side.

[46:25] And the other dimension is the richly transgressive counter such subjectivities that emerge through this revisionary approach. As one follows the roots of indirection that subtly connect Odysseus' and Orlando's wandering return. Above all I was struck by the way indirection, generates lateral understandings and lateral visions of the Odyssey and Orlando. Not just within the specific narratives, but also as one can see there is the four tropes that weakly, and here emphatically I use quotes, "weakly linked them together despite their many differences as they travel across imaginary geographies under teaching us spans of time.

[47:15] Both Odysseus and Orlando are pulled by force and sea movements of sea like movements of diffusion and mixture, island and isolation, passage and detour, and return on split ends." It is this form of circulation that gives accute expression to Odysseus' and Orlando's emerging subjectivities of their kleos and transsexuality, respectively. And so this is what I would like to expand on a bit more for the next three, four minutes, offering some reflections on the significant contribution that Modern Odysseys makes to the emergent study of oblique, or what I would like to call tangent classic systems.

[48:03] Indeed, I would suggest that Michelle's brilliant book could also be entitled Tangent Odysseys, wandering journeys of modernist writings about how human experience and transgression and transgression marginally yet highly creatively make contact with Homer's own tale of return. One of the many virtues of Michelle's book is that it invites readers to reconsider what constitutes reception, both as a methodology and a disciplinary category and how we may expand or indeed rewrite the future of this practice.

[48:44] For me, this begins with Michelle's genius, appeal to Emily Dickinson's poem "Tell all the truth and tell it slant" with tell it slant becoming the guiding model for rethinking how authors like Woolf narrate Orlando's journey as an Odysseus-like voyage to transsexuality within the gender normativity of late Victorian England. Here the concepts of obliquity and tangentiality offer a more capacious paradigm for plotting the pissy quality of Woolf's Odyssian strategies as well as the degree of implicitness, but also indirection, through which her classical knowledge, ideas, impulses, memories, associations, even oversimplifications and inaccuracies emerge and interact with her interesting poem.

[49:46] Indeed one can think of her novel "Orlando", which relates the 36 years of someone's life in the precipitous span of 350 years as a character of narrative casually living alongside, but not in, the world of the Odyssey. In this sense, one finds a limitation in NBCT in wolves regard for the Odyssey, through the lens of traditional avenues of classical reception or within the disciplinary boundaries that consciously or otherwise continue to guard approaches to her classical engagement with Homeric literature.

[50:27] For example, by exclusively tracing substance or obiquity of classical references in such a way that they can speak to and tell of a weighty direct or sizeable point of departure for a reception exercise to be worth pursuing. Michelle is not alone in thinking about ancient and modern encounters in this way. For example, scholars of classics and the classical tradition are increasingly tapping into these kinds of questions.

[51:03] In her 2021 lecture for receptions and comparativisms for the archive of performances in Greek and Roman drama, Emily Greenwood draws attention to the problems that reception still be traced when it comes to the vigilance of its disciplinary borders, which often disclosing transition in transitions views and approaches to the subfield. In my own work, I have tried to argue for a closer study of the emergence of the classical as an absence.

[51:40] You see an absence as a trope for rethinking what we mean and what we are after in the pursuit of classical presences, especially in case of modern authors for whom antiquity is an alluring yet barely there presence. And when the connective thread of influence seems to exist at breaking point, finally, there is much to be learned from students of comparative literature who are also challenging the borders and orders of knowledge in their own field.

[52:14] Just last week, Alexandre Beecroft tapped on this issue in relation to the question of influence, arguing that I quote, "it's easy to compare things that are produced near each other, by people who are able to influence each other. Traditionally, comparative literature has compare literatures in close contact with each other. At first European literatures, later literatures in European languages around the world and sometimes even contemporary literatures in non-European languages where the influence of European literature is clear.

[52:54] But what about comparisons where contact is minimal and almost non-existent? Is that something we should try to do at all?" End quote. So I have two interrelated questions for me, for you and Michelle, and maybe we can discuss them later. What do you envisage as the place of your important study in this growing critique of the enterprise of reception? And second, whether collectively, these new lines of research, including your own, can be set to belong to the category of reception per se.

[53:35] May the future in pale expanding receptions horizons even further and further and further, or might reception become too restrictive, a term to capture the new paradigm? Thank you. Thank you very much, Laura. And those are absolutely central questions. We'll definitely return to them. But first, let's give some time to your fellow night owl there in the UK. Adam, we're ready for you to chime in.

[54:07] Hi, there everybody. I'm just going to share my screen for a presentation. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak. Okay. So as my, as my first slide suggests, this is just a few thoughts on some of my responses, I suppose, to the role of Aime Cesaire in Michelle's book and how, I suppose what it made me think and what I thought we could draw out of that in terms of questions.

[54:38] So in the first instance, so one of the things that we've been saying here is that the Odyssey, as, I mean, when we reach the end of the Odyssey, of Homer's Odyssey, actually we aren't at the end of Odysseus' journey. This is just a snapshot of, and really over the course of Odysseus' mythological life, there are lots of journeys, aren't there, of which this homecoming is only one.

[55:11] And we're told sort of proleptically about all the things that are going to happen after. I was thinking about that in terms of Aime Cesaire as well, about what happens after he's written the particular poem which Michelle talks about, "The Notebook of a Return to My Native Land". So that comes out between sort of 1939 is its initial form and then it reaches another form in 1947 and then it reaches another form of publication in 1956.

[55:45] And actually 1956 is a very crucial year for Aime Cesaire both in terms of his artistic and his political career, because he was both an artist and a politician. So it's actually 1946 that Cesaire resigns from the French communist party after the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in October, 1956.

[56:18] And so that's one reason that he's not happy about the response of the, of the communist party in France to the action because he sees it as being a being an Imperial act by the Soviet Union. And also because he thinks,, he's come to think that actually the communist party don't really care about him and the, and the, the rest of the Black race, so that's what he includes in this famous letter.

[57:06] And so he's kind of chose to chose an entirely different political paths-- path, but it's also the moment, strikingly, when he starts to publish tragedies. So between 1956 and 1973, he actually, I can't remember if he publishes absolutely no poetry, but he certainly mainly publishes tragedies and this is his first one that you can see an image of on the-- on the slide.

[57:43] And I suppose that just led me to think about some of these artistic shifts that took place as Cesaire continued his Odyssey through the artistic and the political world. So on the one hand, and this is something I argue in an essay that I've written about Cesaire, on the one hand, we see a shift from the mythological to the historical and the shift from the sort of more epic poem to these tragic dramas. So he's less interested in the kind of iconic-- in sort of iconic and symbolic representations of his own identity and of his idea of racial politics and racial identity.

[58:31] And he actually becomes more interested in it's kind of historical dimension and in what can be learned from history. And this fits into another shift, which is from the individual to the collective. So when he's writing in his more, it, when he's writing in a mode, which is more related to Homer's Odyssey, there's more of an individual focus for Cesaire, he's more interested in his own journey, both back to Martinique. And also in terms of coming to terms is probably not the right word, but just thinking through his identity.

[59:09] And so there's a shift from that individual focus to a, more, to more of a focus on the collective. So his dramas have a more sort of moral didactic purpose, almost, trying to teach people about the past. And there's also these shifts, there are these two shifts really from epic to tragedy which you can understand both historically and artistically. So you can understand in 1939, in The Notebook, he's interested in history in more of a sort of epic mode.

[59:47] He's interested in things like the Haitian Revolution and its success whereas when he moves through his tragedies, he's interested in history as a kind of tragic thing. So he's interested in, for example, one of his, one of his tragedies is about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in, 1960. So there's also a, so there's this shift in how he thinks about history, but which is kind of, which is kind of it's accompanied by a shift in terms of these artistic forms.

[1:00:24] So he moves from the epic form to the tragic form. And so the idea that his response to the Odyssey is just one part of this journey, that's something that I that I would like us to think about. And also particularly in relation to the other artists that we're talking about. So to what degree is the Odyssey to, what it's like, to what extent do these artists have a kind of Homer's Odyssey phase?

[1:01:00] And the second idea was this idea of internal and external geographies , like kind of internal, psychological geographies and external real-world geographies. And I was really struck by what Michelle wrote about Cesaire's writings about this volcano in Martinique, Mount Pele and how Cesaire grew up nearby. And he, and almost the experience of living near a volcano came to influence his attitude towards his own art that he, he actually saw himself as a volcanic, poet and how that was.

[1:01:44] And so on the one hand, I think that links to ideas of kind of inspiration and kind of the natural forces of poetry. But on the other hand, thinking about the, thinking about the, destructive force of a volcano also led me to think about a line that James Joyce uses about Ulysses when he's describing why he wrote it. So this is obviously, this is another response to the Odyssey, more direct as Michelle commented, but he says on one of his reasons for writing his account, his writing his response to Homer's Odyssey " I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book."

[1:02:47] Now on the one hand, this is this isn't really the same. This isn't really the story that you often hear about Joyce's Ulysses. You hear the story about Joyce's Ulysses it's very much internal. It's about stream of consciousness. It's about human psychology and that sort of comes out quite a lot in Michelle's book, the way in which people are grappling with different forms of identity, different forms of their own way they're positioned in the world. But I wondered about, obviously when you read Homer's Odyssey, there's an external journey as well.

[1:03:22] There's an idea that you are traveling from one place to another in the real world. And it's the same with Cesaire. He is traveling to Martinique and it's almost seems to be the same with Joyce, that he is traveling to Dublin; he wants to account for Dublin. And I wondered, well then I suppose that will bring us to the two questions I had. So on the one hand, we're referring to what I said at first, do we think that allusions to Homer's Odyssey form part of a distinctive stage in the careers of each of the artists that Michelle discusses, or is it unique to Cesaire?

[1:04:02] And second I wondered why, why we all think not only Michelle, that's Homer's Odyssey helps these authors, and also other authors, think about the interaction of these internal and external geographies. So, yeah. Excellent. Thank you very much. Those are great questions. And I also want to thank, Alan Miller and Joseph Arsokay for the questions they put in the Q&A and remind everyone that that is available for you and we'll come back to those.

[1:04:34] But now, Patrice, let's, let's hear from you. So hi everyone. And thanks again for inviting me, Michelle. And everyone should know this is an excellent book, excellently written, evocative in all kinds of really important ways. So, I'm going to also share the screen. And I'd like to spend my 10 minutes, hopefully everyone can see that, maybe someone on the panel can just give me a thumbs up. Great. Thank you. I'd like to spend my time on the idea of dissolution, limits, boundaries in at least three senses.

[1:05:10] The limits of the text, which we've been hearing about, and by that, I mean, both the classical texts and the contemporary. The limits of racial affiliation that the book really begins to, unearth, evoke. And the limits of the human, thirdly, the limits of the human. To some extent, when we talk about seeing things slant wise, or moving the boundaries of the narrative that we create and that have come to define us, and I realized that slanting and boundary crossing are two different, if even compatible tropes, we're really talking about a kind of death , or a kind of passing from one form to another.

[1:05:49] Before the Katabasis before the underworld ascent, we have to encounter disillusion or death, we're crossing a boundary. Cesaire presents the possibility of encountering Negritude through its saint, Toussaint Louverture, as a death crossing for Michelle's opening the definition of Louverture through incantation. And, for those who are jogging and doing other things, while we give our talks , I often listen to these things while I'm running and doing other things, I'm just going to, there's a slide in front of us, a long, quote from Cesaire's work, but I'm just going to read a short portion that's highlighted on the slide.

[1:06:31] "Death traces a shining circle above this man. Death stars softly above his head. Death breathes in the ripened cane of his arms, death gallops in the prison, like a white horse. Death expires in a white pool of silence. Cesaire is interested in the possibility of the emergence from a blackness that is already death to the blackness of Negritude and the image of Louverture leads through the darkness.

[1:07:04] But there's also the possibility exposed by Cesaire's poetry and by Michelle's study of the death of a classical tradition based on hierarchy, or even the end of reception, which we've been hearing about as well and comparativism based on manifest material, tangible points of contact, at least strong links. And I too think that the links in Michelle's book are much stronger, than, we've been suggesting. This disillusion might be regrettable in some ways, the end of these things might be regrettable in some ways, but in other ways, the possibilities are exciting if we can imagine what we're passing into.

[1:07:48] In her definition of fuzzy connections, which I think I couldn't remember exactly Michelle, if you, if you cite, Lorna Hardwick, I think you do, but she reminds us, that readers, she reminds us our, her readers, that meaning is generated at the point of reception between the poet and the audience venturing that the belated artist is, in Hardwick's words, rarely a classical philologist let alone knowledgeable about the contexts of the original text.

[1:08:21] For this meaning generated at the point of reception just how many possibilities might there be? And I'm showing a slide of an image of the Weeknd and Da Baby on Kanye West's "Hurricane", which I've shown at another presentation, gesturing beside the Three Graces. And I'm showing this to suggest the endless and lateral positions that we might imagine. When I think of the classical slant wise, I wonder if, Michelle might talk a little bit about the juxtapositions she left behind.

[1:08:55] And we've heard a little bit about this already, the possibilities that were pruned away for the wonderful coherent composition, the text that is her Modern Odysseys. For example, given Adam's presence here today, I'm struck by Cesaire, by his connection in this case, not at all fuzzy , his association of the Dion-- with the Dionysus of Euripides and of Nietzsche, which Adam teases out in his book "Dionysus After Nietzsche".

[1:09:28] And I'm showing the incantatory repetitions of um, and, uh, it's on the screen in French, but I'm going to read, the English translation. Eia for those who never invented anything, for those who never explored anything, for those who never conquered anything. Eia, for joy. Eia, for love. Eia, for grief. And it's utter, it's utters of reincarnated tears. These are seductive next to the repetitions of Eia in the Bacchai.

[1:10:04] And perhaps Adam here we're disrupting the epic versus tragic associations, "Ο δ'εξαρχοσ βρομιοσ, ευοι. Ευια τον ευιον αγαλλομεναι θεον." So the repetition of the incantation here is certainly Bacchic. This is not necessarily to make a reception argument, but rather to suggest one of the many lateral positionings that generate from Michelle's study of tropes.

[1:10:36] If we take her book as a tool of our own Katabasis of a dissolution of what we know to be a passage into something else. One such passage would be to link Modern Odysseys to occurrent amongst several black studies scholars of querying and multiplying notions of racial affiliation. So I want to suggest here that this book is within a broader context in scholarship, in various fields and the two that I want to highlight are first Black studies and then the post-human.

[1:11:15] In her reading of Cesaire, Michelle proposes that in her words, and I'm just going to read a section of the book here, "Africa, once again, functions as a vital detour to a continent that lies outside the passage that loops the Antilles and Europe. It triangulates a binary relationship by deepening the terms in which it may be understood and extending the purview of history. Cesaire transports the I'image, the, Imago even of the Negritude hero, Louverture, to Africa.

[1:11:49] He travels him, which closes a triangular passage between Europe and the Caribbean by placing Cesaire alongside Cavafy and Woolfe. However, Michelle does the kind of unmasking that Stephen Best credits to Eve Sedgwick in her idea of besideness, besideness, which to Best offers a way out of what he considers to be a dualistic thinking. This besideness, or lateral positioning, the detour, reveals that the route to Africa was not inevitable, nor is this Africa any one thing.

[1:12:33] Saidiya Hartman questioned the notion -- the notional Africa of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic in her book, Lose Your Mother where a trip to Africa, to Ghana, to Africa, to Ghana disrupts her fantasy of kinship. And here again, I'm just going to read a short section of Hartman's book, Which Africa was it that we African-Americans claimed? There was not one Africa there never had been.

[1:13:04] Was Africa merely a cipher for a loss country that no one could any longer name? Was it the remedy for our homelessness or an opportunity to turn our backs to the hostile country we called home? Or was there a future in Africa too? Identity is a fiction, a lie as Kwame Anthony Appiah has it. Kinship evoking, sorry, kinship equivocating in the stay leave, the push and pull of Judith Butler's Broken Bonds in her keynote on kinship.

[1:13:44] The hope that Hartman expresses early in her trip to Ghana of the diasporic possibility of return is disrupted as the hope for kinship ties that result from the social death of enslavement in the United States are revealed to be even more fraught on the continent. Africa is as much a fiction or a multiplicity of imagined affiliations as the Homeland of Ithaca. In light of the realization of aporia, Best chooses, or imagines what it might be like to choose disaffiliation, disaffection over the effective fallacy of association.

[1:14:25] And here is a bit from Stephen Best. He says "Time and again, I would set out to recover something from the archive and fail in the attempt. But what seemed to be affirmed in each attempt was not the recalcitrance of the past, but rather the extent to which I am drawn into being ecstatically dispossessed. Facing up to this fact, I'm inspired to craft a historicism that is not melancholy, but accepts the past's turning away as an ethical condition of my desire for it.

[1:15:00] The past turns away, dissolving Africa, revealing it to be lost in the archives of history. But Best welcomes the dissolution .Best's book is titled None Like Us". And we don't have time today to delve into it, but suffice it to say that the title derives from David Walker's 1833 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World where Walker prays to God that "none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more."

[1:15:31] If there shall be none, unlike us, then disaffiliation, disillusion, death, triumphs over any potential for an effective resection of the past. Any potential of a Black Atlantic conviviality is lost to the isolation that Michelle recognizes alongside Hartman and Best. Here again, very much in keeping with some trends in Black studies that we, over the last 10 years or so. Beside the slant wise view of racial affiliation, not as post racialism, but as a multiplicity of approaches to the historical conundrum of race, I suggest a second context in which we might position Michelle's book, the post-human.

[1:16:19] The construct of the human as Zakia Imaan Jackson argues in "Becoming Human" always already required not necessarily it's opposite in the non-human, but certainly the embodiment of a range of non-human possibilities in, for example, blackened people, especially the blackened female body that could be, as Jackson puts it, "mobilized to produce racial difference." Modern Odysseys is in conversation with discussions of post humanism, particularly those that the digital humanities spawn.

[1:16:56] As Michelle discusses, for example, the flattening of the epic cycle of poetry is oweing to what we heard about earlier in the digital project. And I'm going to quote a little bit, again, this is a longer quote, but I'm just going to quote the bottom half here of, Michelle's introduction to the project "By radically altering notions of authorship and source, and by emphasizing the concept of multiformity and local versions of the return tale, the Homer MultiText Project has enabled a way of thinking about the Odyssey as a composition in performance that competed with and marginalized, other tales.

[1:17:40] Digital humanities occasions the potential disillusion of the text such that associations can be reconfigured in ways that the book exemplifies. The potential of such disillusion as far reaching. Beyond Homer, as Stefan Tanaka puts it in History Without Chronology and again, just reading short portions of a longer quote, "Digital media raises another issue for humanistic scholarship, boundaries between objects, information, facts, knowing and understanding."

[1:18:11] Digital media disrupts or flattens the nature and use of past material. Again, digital humanities is only one of many technologies that dissolve the human as we have come to know it as a discursive reality. Post humanism also places the species alongside technology as another intelligence that displaces the human at the center of knowledge, such as in the creation of cyborgs and artificial intelligence.

[1:18:43] If the text, as we knew it before the delayed, the text as a closed circuit is dead, perhaps we have crossed into the possibility of the disillusion of narrative, or certainly as Tanaka argues, the disillusion of history. Or at the very least we can recognize a shift from the human as storytelling to the human as story and reality revising. And Michelle's book is also a revising-- a rewriting as much as, and as powerfully as Homer is.

[1:19:19] So, there is, is there any more, a narrative closure other than a cybernetic one that raises other circuits that, that calls up other circuits? So thanks Michelle for the book and your diffusion, isolation and detours and returns. You've called us to an endless search for an identity that is actually never to be found, even though we might rest from time to time on the identities that we call home. Thank you very much.

[1:19:53] There we go. I know it comes back to me, and Michelle, I want to give you ample time to respond, so I don't want to go on too long, but I thought it would bring back-- bring us back to sort of two things. One is sort of at a personal level, why your book resonated with me with regard to Cavafy because Cavafy was an important author for me as I struggled against my classical education. So partly what I want to talk about is a return to the very old fashioned idea of hellenism, right?

[1:20:26] And, and think about how you've helped us to really focus on Cavafy's eccentric Hellenism we might call it, right, as opposed to the centered Hellenism that is such a part of the traditional classics curriculum. Which as you know, is fundamentally very Atheno-centric, very caught up in the Periclean moment, right? And I was thinking about that for a couple of reasons. In part though, you know, when Shelly very famously says "we are all Greeks" what he really means is we are all Athenians, right?

[1:20:58] In the liberal democratic tradition that is really fundamentally the focus based on certain types of identity formation, that are constantly being played out with Greek democracy. I'm thinking of, you know, in the poem Helis "Let there be lights at Liberty and like sunrise from the sea Athens arose," you know. Shelly is very good at slogans like that, but he also creates, and I think the classical curriculum traditionally often he did create, in Western Europe and United States, that sort of weird, historical imperialism of Athens, right?

[1:21:31] He goes on to say "Her citizens' imperial spirits rule the present from the past on all this world of men inherits. Their seal is set." So there's a curious way in which this Heidi centered Hellenism that we sort of go into through a traditional classics curriculum, you know, kind of creates that vision. Well I remember, I always struggled with this in part being a medievalist, as well as the person with an interest in classics and reading Cavafy, of course, did precisely what you're talking about with these tropes of diffusion and mixture.

[1:22:04] Showed me a poet who can create these wonderful personae of a very diffused and geographical and temporal dispersion of Hellenism. So in a way, taking the idea of Odyssey and his famous poem on Ithaca, we sort of think of Cavafy's engagement as a sort of Odyssey of Hellenism itself, right, which is one of the fascinating things about these historical personae that he creates. And if we want to take his poem, Ithaca, just as a point of departure, again, the point is the journey and not the return destination, right?

[1:22:38] So when we think about what it is, in the field of classics for so long, the obsessive return, always to the original horizon, right? Trying to get to the authentic reality of this ancient culture. It's done us such a tremendous disservice in understanding, you know, the complexity and the compromise that is Hellenism. And again, I think this is one of the reasons why, both the Odyssey and Cavafy's work are, need to be read constantly in this way. The idea of return is essential in a way, as he says, it is Ithaca that gave you the lovely journey, right?

[1:23:15] So again, this impulse to return incorporate, and in some sense, build a relationship with the past I don't think ever fully goes away with those. But what fascinates me with Cavafy and again, that you bring out so well, is how his Odyssey of Hellenism deliberately pushes to the far corners, not just Alexandria, but Antioch, Hellenized Jerusalem, Constantinople in the Byzantine world, which is very important given his funereal lineage and even beyond Zagros, as he says in his I think wonderfully ironic poem, back to you in a minute.

[1:23:50] So I love that your book also reminds us that in the Odyssey itself, we're dealing with a peripheral Hellenic world. I mean, Troy is, after all, is in the far Eastern edge, Ithaca on the Western edge, Ogygia farther still, right? In fact, we only get to the mainland of Greece because Telemachus decides to go there from Ithaca, right? In real time that is to say. So Homer's world is itself this interesting kind of peripheral world in the Odyssey.

[1:24:21] And the Achaeans are often in abject defeat so that the idea of it as a triumphal pageant, as we're constantly thinking and rehearsing, what is this old heroic version of, you know, of Greece? Obviously we all know, in reading Homer that the sorrow, the loss, the sort of impending sense of doom, these are powerful elements that have nothing to do with a kind of triumphalism. And so in that sense, reading the Odyssey in this way, vis-a-vis Cavafy really you know, resonated with me, I remember at a very early age, precisely as a sort of antidote.

[1:24:57] But lately I've actually been thinking of a poem by another poet who responds to Cavafy and that's my former colleague Adam Zagajewski who was here for some years before he went to Chicago. And here's a poem called "Falling Asleep Over a Volume of Cavafy". And what's interesting is he depicts Cavafy's cast of characters, these historical personae throughout his poems, as interesting sort of stylized failures. Quote, "Who endured failure superbly with grace and accepted the catastrophe of their nations, their cities systematically subdued by Rome, not easily, but with unequal brilliance."

[1:25:36] He goes on to say, since their consolation was quote "Something, no conquest could take from them, or so they thought, their place in the Hellenic world." So what's interesting again, is he sort of picks up on the way in which so many of the personae in his poems are being a form of Hellenism that seems to be part of this sort of struggle. But it is a Hellenism , as I sort of mentioned, of hybridity, of diffusion, of mixture as you point out so well in your reading on the poem, on the Posedonians, for example.

[1:26:08] But Zagajewski continues to say that they seem quote, "Taken up with preparations for eternal rest, a beautiful defeat stirring our sympathy. Though, few of them are heroes, cunning, not honor, drives them." So again, the idea that the personae of these poems have the cunning, right? That is the sort of essential Odyssean feature, makes them sympathetic despite often the sense that they are compromised, right? And in some of their pretensions.

[1:26:40] So why am I interested in Adam's view? Adam was a Polish poet, but originally from Lviv in what is today Ukraine, that invaded and violated place. And so when I think about Adam growing up at the crossroads of Eastern and Western empires and living through the history that he did, a history personally of displacement as a poet, again, I think of all of these tropes and the sort of profound and personal way in which they sort of enter in to our reading and absorption.

[1:27:12] And so again, I come back to the idea of "what do we do now that we're in a diffused world of reception studies with a concept like Hellenism itself", right? It is historically, as his poems often point, out a reality of diffusion and mixture, of conflict and compromise. He does such a great job of creating personae that each represent this eccentric Hellenism from some point in the Mediterranean world when, obviously, more in tune geographically with the view from Alexandria as his reality was.

[1:27:45] But also temporally with the peripheral view of a modern Hellene, far from the numinous culture of the ancient world and all the claims to sort of use it for authenticity and justification, right? Speaker of a contested and unstable modern language in his day, a minority language, both in Alexandria and within Western Europe as a whole. In a bulking culture with a declining and later post- Ottoman sort of mindset in reality. So, the same time, what's so fascinating about him, and this goes to the question of, homoeroticism that you bring up so well, is living in the comforts of that age of cosmopolitan, hybridity in Alexandria which is such a part of a lost world like Smirnoff or Thessaloniki before the Holocaust.

[1:28:30] It is a Hellenism that is precarious yet some show us powerful yet evanescent. Yet Cavafy's remains a decidedly tenacious and infectious Hellenism as some of the poems involving Judea suggest Alexander Junius and Alexandra Pius has Minoan monarchs who speak Greek and have Greek names are depicted in one poem in a moment of triumph, suddenly betraying of course, the anti-Hellenic aspirations of the Maccabees. And this reminds us that ironically, the very word Ἑλληνισμός (Hellenism) took on a sense of a whole cultural system of values and not just linguistics, not just linguistic norms and dialectical tension with the newly coined Ιουδαϊσμός (Judaism).

[1:29:11] This is the irony of second Maccabees, a text couched in Greek and infused with Greek rhetoric that talks of a pious revolution against Greek culture and forced Hellenization. Cavafy's poem pumps a triumphal moment of these Jewish monarchs for all its irony, for which all the poet has to do is repeat over and over again their names, Alexander and Alexandra. Obviously, these are not Jewish names. Once you escape from Hellenism, that's one of the fun things about some of these poems. And of course this dialectical tension with Hellenism goes the other way with the barbarian in "Waiting for the Barbarian After All", right?

[1:29:50] He says "What's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were those people a kind of solution," as he very famously says. So again, we see Hellenism, as a dialectical sort of tense hybrid sort of concept. So the idea of an infectious Hellenism has brought out all the more in another poem about a Hellenized Jew, Yianntis son of Anthony in "Of the Jews 50 AD". Though Yianntis professes a desire to quote, "remain forever son of the Jews, the holy Jews", the Greek pursuit of sensuous beauty has its hooks in him.

[1:30:24] There's a deliberate identification in this poem of Ἑλληνισμός with ηδονισμός with Hellenism and hedonism, a point that obviously you refer to when we get back to the question of homoeroticism. The art and pleasure of Alexandrian Hellenism have captured this devotion and there's no turning back, right? That's kind of the interesting implication of that poem. So Cavafy's is in various ways and ironic, not an iconic Hellenism right? One that is infectious, and yet also dangerously, sort of, skirting cultural pretensions.

[1:30:59] There's both triumph and tattoo furry that we see throughout these moments of history that he shows us as in Alexandrian kings, for example, the poem where he talks about the children of Cleopatra and Antony being brought out along with given all these wonderful titles and, you know, presented to the crowd who are raving, but he's openly says the "Alexandrians knew of course, that this was all mere words, all theater." Right? So the theatricality of these moments is one of the things that I think makes his work so distinctive.

[1:31:35] So what's an interesting though, to come back to Adam's point, is that nonetheless, we find this weird sympathy with these characters in these poems, as compromised as they are as semi-barbaric or semi Hellenized as they are. And I think, again, this is such a wonderful way to sort of start to think about how we can meditate on the, the idea of a Hellenism in the future or its sort of dynamic relationship with other concepts as we sort of work on this notion.

[1:32:06] After all we're not all Greeks and Shelly since, we are hybrid peripheral, eccentric belated Greeks, right, Semi barbaric, semi-hellenized in the profession as a whole as we have always been. And this is why I would just like to end with a wonderful look at the, at the poem Philhellene, which if you've never read it it's quite funny about an Eastern king's pretensions beyond Zagros far to the east where he's designing a coin and here we see the philhellene becomes the Philistine, right?

[1:32:41] He says he wants the word philhellene and put on the coin since so many others, more barbarian than ourselves choose to inscribe it, we would inscribe it too. And besides, don't forget that sometimes sofas to come to us from Syria and versifiers and other triflers of that kind. So we are not, I think, "un Greek". So that question that arises in that point, "where are the Greeks" "where is the Greek culture"? Is as valid in London or Berlin or Alexandria or behind Zagros or even in Houston.

[1:33:12] And so again, I applaud juxtaposition of Cavafy and Homer, especially the Odyssey for that very reason. Okay. So in all fairness to Michelle, who's had to endure much praise and many questions, I think I'm going to let her begin her response. And I will remind everyone there's a question and answer function here where questions can be ordered. I see at least three here.

[1:33:42] So, the interest of time, again, it helps us to order those things if we can get it there and I'll try to feed those in, but Michelle, you have the floor. Thank you all for those wonderful engagements in different ways with the book and with your own projects and problems many of us are thinking about in the profession. I guess I want to take the, some of the broader questions first that, that loud opposes and, maybe get my way into other, into some of the other questions that way.

[1:34:17] First of all, I guess I want to say the obvious thing, that almost all of us, whether we're classicists or anybody who studies the humanities, we've learned ways of interpreting the past that involve the need to establish causal relations and direct contacts. This has been so much a part of the way that we are ingrained to work as scholars that the feeling often is that your work is soft or that in some ways it lacks, expertise if you don't go about arguing that way.

[1:34:55] So I want to begin there because I want to say, first of all, that there will always be a place and a need for what we're calling reception studies, but basically arguments that have to do with what writers in the present or in later points in history, how they used, adapted and took over and assimilated prior forms. So I'm not arguing that we are moving out of the need for that at all. What I want to say rather is that all of us now are being asked to think in more global terms of trans nationalism and internationalism, various forms of crossing these huge geographical and cultural boundaries that are very hard for us to cross.

[1:35:46] They're almost impossible to cross if we maintain our old ways of thinking about literary relationships. So what I want to say about that is that because the opening of the Canon means that we're opening the Canon to texts that resisted the Canon, okay? This is the key point, you see, that acts of literary resistance are often aimed at decolonializing or at taking aims at the patriarchy and these critical efforts to understand them can be radically limited if we are approaching these texts as if we can talk about them, in terms of traditional reception theory.

[1:36:36] It is offensive to the writing. It is obtuse about what is involved in opening the Canon if we continue to use these critical methods. So the hardest thing that we're doing now is, well, we're opening the door to talking about, you know, a more global Canon, but how do we do that? My point is that we're often doing it by not revising our tools, our critical tools, enough. So talking back to the empire can be constricting since it obeys the orders of the hegemonic order.

[1:37:12] If you're pretending that people are answering back to the empire, then you are in effect, tying them into what is the empire saying. So one of the things I want to say is that that is something that we need to think hard about. The other thing I want to say about frontal connections and various of you have put this in different ways is that if you, if you argue that so-and-so was responding to so-and-so, then you give the impression that the text is, in a sense, comprehensible around a very limited point of reception, right?

[1:37:51] And many of the artists I was talking about, and many of the artists we're dealing with in our post-classicisms are resisting that. The three artists that I was talking about radically resist that because they use techniques of diffusion and indirection in order to forestall this kind of obsessive need to find a point of reception as a unified point of reception.

[1:38:23] Okay? The last thing I want to say about the methodology of all this and, and is that yes, I am talking about largely subjectivities in the book and identities in the emergence of counter subjectivities of the sort I was studying, identities are typically virtual rather than ontologically stable they're multiply constituted. They're composed of mixed races, hybrid ethnicities, cross-gendered beings, transsexual experiences, the subject is many and not one.

[1:39:06] And therefore a works that attempt hard to put that into motion need to have those gestures respected. So, you know, Casey was saying at the beginning, what many of you have echoed. And that, that is what we're being faced with is the challenge of really undoing many of the ways in which we've been taught to think, and to do that in ways that are rigorous and compelling, and that therefore can convince those who are working in more mainstream ways that this not only can be done, but it can be done compellingly.

[1:39:41] So I guess I will open around that. I don't just want to talk about the questions, but if there's anybody who would like to answer back to that, I'm happy to just pause here. I would just say one thing if I may. And I certainly don't want to dominate the conversation, but, which is, again, I think part of this is the problem of the humanities generally within the context of academic work, which means that we're expected to have arguments and discoveries, right? And evidence. And so as a consequence, that does encourage a certain linear thinking.

[1:40:15] And the odd thing about that is, you know, the old classical tradition sort of argument would be to sort of prove classics deserves to exist because it, you know, remains relevant and, you know, sort of like you still need us. Which is obviously a very self-defeating way to look at it. And, um, the other thing, it's a fallacy, right? To think of causal relationships in such simplistic terms, because, you know, again, when someone is educated at a particular point and is reading the Odyssey, that acculturation is convergent with every other acculturation they're going through at the same time, right?

[1:40:56] So that this is why for me, it's really been an issue of focusing on complex convergence, because we create classical culture. You know, that's what we're doing all the time. We create modern texts. We create the modern phenomenology of the text of , you know, the ancient texts. And so the idea that somehow, you know, ancient Greece is like a radio station broadcasting from the fifth century and we're picking up the signal is a fallacy, right? And then it's a very uncomfortable -- uncomplicated way to think, but you can understand why university administrators like that, you know, because it's a simple way of assessing someone's made a strong argument that they have evidence, you know, again, journals often like this problem too.

[1:41:34] So when we open up different ways of thinking about literature, philosophy, et cetera, that are more associative and less concerned with, you know, what did he know and when did he know it, the Watergate question I like to think, of reception studies. I think that's part of the problem. Alan Miller had a comment or a question in-- Before you go, just a quick response to Michelle, what you offered us. It seems to me, you're raising a question about audience and it makes me wonder "for whom are we doing our work?"

[1:42:10] Is it, is it for some established classical elite in the academy? Is it invitational for, let's say a 21st century student who's also considering robotics and computer science and business? You know, is it for the Weeknd where, you know, go up to the Weeknd and ask him, what were you doing when you gestured by the three graces? So and in some ways what the besideness offers is a kind of expansion of audiences and a kind of cross viewing such that all of those audiences are invited to the table.

[1:42:52] Yeah, no I think that's, that's really right. Somehow we're tied into this notion of expertise that makes it very difficult for us to talk outside of the fields that we've cultivated best. I will say that in my book, you know, I'm not an expert on any of the authors that I talked about. I don't consider myself an expert, but Richard and I have talked about it and the point about expertise is that if you engage in a project that requires you to know things about what you're studying, you think are important, then you develop the expertise to talk about it compellingly.

[1:43:27] And often, beginning from the point of view of an outsider can very much help the conversation. That's one of the things that I want to say. Many of you were wondering how else this kind of way of thinking about indirection might work more broadly. And I think actually the idea becomes less elusive. It was a little bit hard for me to grasp it in the years I was trying to conceptualize the concept. But if you look at very canonical texts, like Plato's dialogues and you consider the dialogue form itself and you consider it like the bulk of Plato's work, which is multiple dialogues, which take each other apart actually, if you read dialogues against each other.

[1:44:16] Furthermore, if you read Plato, understand that in these dialogues, he's using a certain kind of discourse that cannot approach the subject directly and therefore he resorts to myth in order to talk about it, this is a strategy of indirection. This is a strategy by which the acknowledgment is that you cannot approach it frontally, therefore, you can talk about indirection as being part of an entire philosophical tradition. Hereclitis is a famous embodiment of it, but you know, certainly negative theology is also a part of, this negative philosophy is a part of this where strategies of indirection come to be absolutely vital in trying to formulate what it is you're talking about.

[1:45:02] I think that there are many literary works that have to do with searches for identity, where authors use these very ,tangential and kaleidoscopic way of-- ways of coming at their subject. And I think that certainly the genre of mystery itself is something that you can look at as a strategic use of indirection. I think there are whole topics that lend themselves to this way of thinking about indirection.

[1:45:33] I'm writing now on the ancient mystery calls, and I'm talking about discourses of secrecy. Wherever you have discourses of secrecy, you have things that may or may not be actual secrets, but that are in various ways being approached through, indirection to create mystique, to solicit interest, to build audiences, or to construct communities of individuals who are marginal. Right? So my part is that-- my point is that sometimes indirection is something that we're looking at in the literature and sometimes it's something that is required of us as interpreters of texts to cultivate in the ways that we read and talk about things.

[1:46:20] So again, open, you know, open to discussion. Again, if I may refer a question from our question and answer our Q&A here, Alan Miller asked, " if receptions boundaries keep moving ever more distantly, does it not become indistinguishable at some point from a Chris Stephen concept of intertextuality? So again, we, obviously, we're always talking about intertextual studies, but, I don't know if you have any, if anyone has any thoughts on that.

[1:46:59] Thinking about what you just saying, Michelle, the idea about like when you mentioned negative theology, I just had the thought that like, the reason you have to be indirect in that instance is because the thing you're talking about is ineffable, you can't talk about it, that you don't like, you can't really conceptualize the subject of your discourse. And I, which I suppose I think that probably links to do with that-- there are probably links there with what Kristeva writes about Cora and things like the ineffability of that the kind of unrepresentability.

[1:47:45] But I think I, and I, I suppose it feels like that's a product of it just in terms of your book, that's a product of, that's actually something which all of the authors, are grappling with, the idea of something that's not yet been articulated-- Yes. --But which they're having to find a vocabulary for something which is ineffable in their own personal sort of in their own relations to themselves as a part of themselves, which they don't necessarily understand in which they're trying to come to terms with.

[1:48:16] And it's an, I mean, just to use your, just to use the obvious metaphor, it's a journey. It is a homecoming, it's a kind of welcoming of the self. But that's sort of putting words to it. So that was, yeah, I was just what I thought. Yeah, I, yeah, I think that, the things that are ineffable, nonetheless provoke, a great deal of language about them.

[1:48:46] This is part of the irony of the unethical is that it produces a discourse of the ineffable. And I think that you know, I think that's an important problem that you can look at from any, you know, any number of perspectives. But yes, I mean, this is to go to Paul's question though, one of the things that I think is most challenging to us is we, and that I was trying to deal with in creating a set of four tropes, was to work against the concept of the text.

[1:49:25] Because the works I was talking about are so open that they defy textuality, they resist closure, they resist, they resist a certain common sense way in which we approach texts that is partly the consequences of reading them in books. And that, that, and that is the sense that they're contained, right? That they're somehow contained and that they somehow have these limits that allow us to manage them and control them. Casey knows from her own work that people who are trying to theorize, you know, the consequences of the non-text in Homer have to consider, continue to use the language of the text.

[1:50:09] So if you don't want to talk about texts, but you're talking about intertextuality well, there we are. Our language is constantly, you know belying us in our efforts. So I partly resist critical language jargon for that reason. One of the strategies I use in my own work is to try to generate a critical idiom from the works that I'm reading. And we of course can never totally jettison the frameworks around us and the language of our profession, but by generating the language out of the text and talking about things like, a poetics of slantness or indirection or a poetics of ambush, what we're effectively trying to do is, is to say that the texts are teaching us, the works are teaching us how to talk about them.

[1:51:07] Okay? And the way that we're talking about them, the reason why, or orality on one side and the digital world on the other are converging is because we are testing the limits of our ideas about what a text. This is the point also about what Patrice was saying about the post-human is that very, I mean, for centuries now, the human has been conceived of in terms of texts that are books. And I think that paying close attention to what the digital world is telling to us about texts is that we need to create a new critical idiom.

[1:51:47] And we don't do that necessarily by talking about inter texts. If I might pick up, one of our questions from the Q&A, this is from Andrea Kouklanakis, it's precisely about the words that you've chosen. So, the question: "is focusing on forging critical vocabulary, could you elaborate a bit on distinctions between all these words: slantness, indirection, obliqueness. I often use them interchangeably, but in terms of multiple subjectivities, should we distinguish them further?

[1:52:19] Slantness can also be a condition of feeling unhinged, no? Canonicity, imperial projects, aggressive capitalism, racism, homophobia, all can push people to alienation and alienation is a place from which you can only be slanted and uncomfortable, whether you create art, create art from it or not." So that's quite a question, but, so if you can maybe elaborate on slantness, indirection and obliqueness. Yeah, no, I think this is a good point. What I would say is that, Laura and I , Laura and I have begun to talk about a project that she's now formulating that is going to be oriented towards what kind of vocabulary you might develop around this.

[1:53:01] In my, in my book, I have been experimenting with alternative terminology, recognizing that much of what I'm talking about, actually tips on the brink of things like psychopathy and madness and complete dissolution. So I think that, that, you know, there are ways that that's partly why we've-- some people have come to look at Odysseus himself who is so many sided as potentially psychopathic.

[1:53:32] And just in the sense that there are pathologies of the psyche at work there that, that suggests this radical way that he doesn't fit in. I don't really have the time here to probably to talk about the differences between those terms. I do use them synonymously, but I would say part of our project now is to begin to create a vocabulary that can be more expressive, more careful, perhaps sometimes also leading towards the need for greater fuzziness, developing a tolerance for a healthy fuzziness that, is probably inevitable to all categorizing.

[1:54:15] And that's an enterprise that I'm very much open to, you know, open to. Well, let's go to a, an interesting question that came earlier in the chat from delirium for the GME. And that is just asking you, you know, we often talk about faithfulness and betrayal with regard to texts and rewriting. So the question here is "how would you explain the significant faithfulness or betrayal of the modern writers to the original Odysseus? Do you think that any of the writers betrays the thematic purpose of the original Odysseus?"

[1:54:46] And again, I think this goes to an interesting question of as keepers of classical literature in a sense were often put as gatekeepers, right? Wanting to somehow adjudicate between correct and incorrect readings. So let's empower your point of view, now. How would you respond to that question? Yeah. I would say that in the ways I approached the texts I was talking about, fidelity was, was, was just not the issue. In other words, my, my, my view was that theories of adaptation have been developed to help us talk about that and so have theories of translation.

[1:55:24] Adaptation and translation have given us more careful ways of talking about fidelity. I think the notion of fidelity can sometimes lead us into thinking that the limits of what it is we can say and do are somehow determined by what's already been said and done. And that is precisely what I'm resisting. And, and not only that, I mean, I'm not the only one resisting, it obviously. It's that the writers that we are including in this wider, post canonical world are not doing that either.

[1:56:03] They're testing or notions of fidelity very deliberately, you know, in order to say things that have not been said in the canonical works that we read. So, Pelumi, is actually one of my students and thank you Pelumi for the question. I think that, you know, there are a number of classicists who've worked very credibly on like a, you know, Aegean like the Black Aegean who, who addressed questions of fidelity in that way.

[1:56:37] But I think that there are other ways in which we have to ask the question about why fidelity-- when fidelity matters and when it is a distraction that is actually impeding us from being able to think and say things in new ways. Laura has a comment or question? Yeah, just as a follow-up I was thinking that also the question of fidelity is problematic because it brings a sort of uni linear way of thinking about the original source, I'm speaking to the students here.

[1:57:11] You know, one of the things you can do, and this is also part of the poetics of indirection, is that you can begin reading whatever you want. You don't have to begin with the classic. You know, for example, I, I learned about Homer through Borges when I was 17. I hadn't read Homer and for me, this was a curiosity into a journey that I, I just didn't know it was Borges himself who was teaching me how to read these texts.

[1:57:45] So these indirections, and then of course I amplified much more the variety of authors that I was looking at. So fidelity for me was just besides the point, because this is just about a network of different authors that are telling each other different things about what the Canon might or not be. So in Spanish, we've got this thing that we call about , La Tradicion Classica but we also call it la traición Classica, the treason of tradition, which is a positive term, is to think about, I am going to Richard, can you translate this?

[1:58:30] Yeah. It's just, it's a game of words because it's "tradicion" and you remove the 'd' and this becomes a paradigm for unlocking that servitude to the original. I'm not talking to the expert, I'm talking much more to, I usually say that to my students in classical reception, because all they begin with is the classics. So then you have to tell a story that somehow it's faithful back to the classic.

[1:59:04] So that might be a way of thinking about it. And again, a very old point of view and reception studies is about, again, meaning being realized at the point of reception is there's no space, no Archimedean point from which a text can be seen in its truth, you know, there are only interactions, right? So when we think about complex convergence, in my case, for example, I've been very interested in thinking about performance in relation to Freud and his interest in Oedipus and what you realize is, you know, yes, Freud read Oedipus in the ______, but he reads it also as someone who is powerfully influenced by French romantic tragedy, which makes a lot of sense when you start to think about it and his reading of the play, which is so important for psychoanalysis, is simultaneously a reading of Oedipus the King in Hamlet.

[1:59:54] And these complex convergences, they are the reality of culture, right? Again, you know, Hamlet in Oedipus the King views the things that he's reading, you know, at the same time growing up and his theatrical experience sort of reinforces this and you realize : our individual trajectories do not replicate the chronology of Western civilization, you know? We're always out of time, always out of step, we're always catching up. We're always saying," I need to go back and read Callimachus whatever, you know? So, so this is why it's, it's a little silly, right, in a way when you realize, why did we ever think it was any other way?

[2:00:29] A complex convergence, dissociative nature, that so much of our reading experience or theatrical experience impresses upon us or a particular person, you know, forces a book on you or a particular moment in your life, right, has certain parts of a text that emerge to you, perhaps you later, you might think disproportionately, as you were saying Laura, with coming to Homer through _______, right? This is the reality, right? And, and I think, again, this is where the humanities will remain so important in understanding the nature and trajectory of human meaning.

[2:01:05] We're always struggling with research paradigms as you know, because administrations want us to sort of quantify and calculate what research is for us, but the experiential is such an important element in this, and it is a temporal and confusing. We're at 6:02! I think we've done a good hole here and I know some of you need to go to bed. I, I want to thank everyone for their participation through the questions. Again, our student friends, as well as our colleagues, and I really want to thank Michelle for exposing herself to so much praise and so much critique.

[2:01:43] Thank you all. And again, let's continue this discussion in the future and do, if you have a chance , and any energy left, perhaps tomorrow, check out our online symposium on syndicate.network of Mario Telos' book, which is a, another shocking and startling book, Archived Feelings: The Theory of Greek Tragedy. Okay? So thank you again, and especially our, thanks to the Center for Hellenic Studies. Allie, thanks for your help and Olivia, and we will hopefully see you all again soon.

[2:02:17] Thank you. Thank you all.