The AJP Best Article Prize for 2022 Has Been Presented by the American Journal of Philology to Rosa Andújar King's College London

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The AJP Best Article Prize for 2022 Has Been Presented by the American Journal of Philology to Rosa Andújar King’s College London
• Alain Gowing, Matthew Farmer, and Jackie Murray

for her contribution to scholarship in “Philological Reception and the Repeating Odyssey in the Caribbean: Francisco Chofre’s La Odilea” AJP 143.2 (Summer 2022): 305–334.

Two of the Journal’s four issues in 2022 constituted a two-part special issue, “Diversifying Classical Philology,” devoted to advancing AJP’s commitment to “helping to transform the practice and the identity of our discipline so that it both reflects and engenders greater intellectual diversity and becomes an exciting venue for the work of scholars of all backgrounds” (Editor’s Letter, Vol. 143.2). Rosa Andújar’s “Philological Reception and the Repeating Odyssey in the Caribbean: Francisco Chofre’s La Odilea” not only represents an exceptional and exceptionally successful contribution to this effort, but also stands out in several important respects as the best article published by AJP in 2022.

Francisco Chofre’s (1949–1999) La Odilea is likely not well known to most classicists. A prose adaptation in 24 cantos of Homer’s Odyssey written in Cuba during the 1960’s Revolution, La Odilea “refigures” Homer’s heroic characters as guajiros or peasants, his gods as humans, such as Zeulorio, the estate owner, who has eyes on La Pena, the husbandless wife. The novel follows the journey and adventures of the peasant farmer Odileo (significantly, not the expected Odiseo or Ulises) through a Caribbean landscape. Andújar challenges the common view of La Odilea as a parody of Homer as overly simplistic, arguing that Chofre transforms the Homeric model in significant ways. Quite apart from the novel’s setting and characters, the language of La Odilea is perhaps its most distinctive feature: it is written almost entirely in Cuban dialect, an important aspect of the novel’s effort to capture a distinctly agrarian experience. As Andújar terms it, these “meticulous linguistic transformations” are a model of “‘philological’ reception” that ground the novel in Cuban oral tradition; they also, however, “function as the vernacular equivalent to the features of oral composition” characteristic of Homeric epic (Homer himself makes an appearance in the novel). Far from being a simple parody of its Homeric model, La Odilea is shown to possess “a tense and ambiguous relationship [End Page v] with its source text, one in which desecration and veneration are intimately bound together.” Following her deft examination of the novel’s language and its relationship with the Homeric model, Andújar broadens the scope of her article to consider La Odilea in the context of the Cuban Revolution and, most intriguingly, the novel’s place in the “unique resonance” of the Odyssey throughout the postcolonial Caribbean.

Andújar’s article is exemplary in several important respects: in its capacity to model innovative and groundbreaking work in reception studies; in its intellectual rigor and philological expertise; in the clarity of the writing; and in its forward looking, expansive perspective on reception studies (and Caribbean classical receptions) in particular and on the field of classical scholarship generally. Remarkably for such a sophisticated literary analysis, Andújar’s article is written in an accessible, even generous style that renders it not only valuable for specialists, but a perfect introduction for students to the world of possibilities that the study of reception opens up for our field. [End Page vi]

Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press ...