{"title":"Like Father, Like Son? Reading & Rereading Homer's Odyssey in Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey","authors":"S. R. Knighten","doi":"10.1353/clw.2022.0024","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The cultural presence of Homer's Odyssey throughout literary history cannot be understated. It is a text that has inspired endless reading and adaptation, especially in the twenty-first century. One new adaptation stands out among the ever-growing list of Odyssey reinterpretations. Daniel Mendelsohn's 2017 memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic recounts a classics professor's experience teaching his octogenarian father in an undergraduate course on Homer's epic. This essay explores the way Mendelsohn's memoir reads and rereads the father-son relationship in the Odyssey. Through the use of the epic convention of anagnorisis (recognition) as well as by challenging the poem's standard for father-son relationships, Mendelsohn explores the extent to which a son can truly know his father and succeed him.","PeriodicalId":46369,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL WORLD","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"CLASSICAL WORLD","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2022.0024","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"CLASSICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACT:The cultural presence of Homer's Odyssey throughout literary history cannot be understated. It is a text that has inspired endless reading and adaptation, especially in the twenty-first century. One new adaptation stands out among the ever-growing list of Odyssey reinterpretations. Daniel Mendelsohn's 2017 memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic recounts a classics professor's experience teaching his octogenarian father in an undergraduate course on Homer's epic. This essay explores the way Mendelsohn's memoir reads and rereads the father-son relationship in the Odyssey. Through the use of the epic convention of anagnorisis (recognition) as well as by challenging the poem's standard for father-son relationships, Mendelsohn explores the extent to which a son can truly know his father and succeed him.
期刊介绍：
Classical World (ISSN 0009-8418) is the quarterly journal of The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, published on a seasonal schedule with Fall (September-November), Winter (December-February), Spring (March-May), and Summer (June-August) issues. Begun in 1907 as The Classical Weekly, this peer-reviewed journal publishes contributions on all aspects of Greek and Roman literature, history, and society.
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