Odysseus finally returns home in Book XIII of the Odyssey, but “could not tell what land it was / after so many years away … The landscape looked strange, unearthly strange / to the Lord Odysseus” (XIII. 238-39, 245-46). Odysseus spends the next seven books carefully making his way around Ithaka, making allegiances, and practicing his trademark dissembling and contending in order to insinuate himself into the presence of the suitors to make them eventually “atone in blood!” (XI.132).
Tag Archives: odysseus
The Odyssey, Book 10 Notes
Several themes and scenes from book nine are paralleled in book ten. The theme of hospitality that began book nine also begins book ten on Aiolia Island, domain of the wind king who takes pity on Odysseus and gives him a bag of winds, perhaps an appropriate gift for the tactician.
The Odyssey, Book 9 Notes
Odysseus begins book nine of the Odyssey by venerating King Alkinoos’ rhapsode, emphasizing, in a very rhetorical way, the foundation of human community. At the center of Phaeacia stands the hall of the King in which the people gather to dine in the community of others and listen to the tales of the poet: “Here is the flower of life, it seems to me!” (IX.11).
Certeau’s Strategies and Tactics
In defining strategy and tactic, Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life suggests that the former maintains a dominance in a specific environment by the othering of “an exterior distinct from it”; the latter operates within the same environment by seizing opportunities which the tacticians (“others”) constantly generate. The other cannot escape the [...]
Odysseus and the Poet
I recently been thinking about rhetoric, memory, and poetry and how they are interrelated. Along with the Odyssey, I have been reading Plato’s dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus. The dialogues discuss rhetoric as being a “knack” used for persuasion that does not necessarily have anything to do with Truth. Now, it seems to me, that if poetry were put into the equation, and Plato’s metaphysical memory, then Homer seems to embody the, what Plato ambiguously calls, “true rhetorician.”
The Odyssey: General Notes
Homer’s Odyssey has got to be — still after multiple readings — one of my favorite works of Western Literature. This epic is a nostos, or a story of return, and asks can one come home again, especially after years of bloody war?
