Modern Odysseys: A Panel Discussion
Channel: The Center for Hellenic Studies
Date: 2022-03-11

Accessibility Note: Automatic subtitles were turned on during the Zoom event; there may be errors.

A discussion of Michelle Zerba's book Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire and a Poetics of Indirection (OSUP, 2021), moderated by Richard Armstrong and Michelle Zerba. 

This symposium gathers a range of classicists with wide comparative literary interests who have explored the resources but also the limits of reception studies. Organized around the publication of Michelle Zerba’s Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection, the discussion seeks to create a horizon for reading beyond the usual unilinear organization of “classical influences” and “modern adaptations” that dominate the field of classical reception. Since the book examines the emergence of counter subjectivities within international modernism that have shaped what we now call homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness, it provides a powerful example of how broadly classical reception studies can engage with other literary fields. But it will also open a discussion of how paradigms of reception are changing from those of “classical presences” to more oblique and subtle relations that investigate what it means to "tell it slant," in the words of Emily Dickinson.

For more information, visit https://chs.harvard.edu/event/modern-odysseys/