Document Type
Post-Print
Publication Date
7-2018
Abstract
It has been a commonplace among anthropologists since Malinowski that during the performance of traditional stories the listening community experiences the primordial past when the gods still appeared freely to humans. Significantly, this involves not a return to the past, but a return of the past. The Odyssey not only depicts its own hero as a character from the heroic past, in which the gods were intimately involved with the heroes who fought at Troy, but also as one who brings the past with him when he returns home to an Ithaca that represents a greatly diminished present. In so doing, the Odyssey reproduces the metaphysics of its own performance, so that singing the epic is represented as a deeply religious act that restores the ancestors to life and equally restores the modern condition to past greatness.
DOI
10.1093/litimag/imy030
Publisher
Oxford University Press
City
Oxford, UK
Repository Citation
Cook, E. F. (2018). Homeric time travel. Literary Imagination, 20(2), 220-221. https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imy065
Publication Information
Literary Imagination
Comments
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.