Odysseus as improvisatory spirit?

The Classics Department will host a lecture by Carol Dougherty of Wellesley College titled "Improvising the Self in Homer's Odyssey" at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.

Dougherty, the William J. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classical Studies and the director of Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities, will examine the Odyssey's protagonist as a kind of improviser: how the mythic figure of Odysseus embodies a kind of improvisatory spirit at the thematic level in the poem, one that is particularly well suited to the turbulent period of the Homeric poems. Instead of approaching Odysseus' disguises and "lying tales" in the second half of the poem as a departure from his true self, Dougherty will argue that Odysseus improvises new identities for himself as part of the process of negotiating his return home.

Dougherty has published extensively on ancient Athens, on classical mythology, on Greek epic poetry and drama, and on the tales the Greeks told themselves about their efforts to colonize the ancient Mediterranean. She has written three widely acclaimed books: Prometheus, in the Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World Series (Routledge Press, 2006); The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's Odyssey (Oxford, 2001); and The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece (Oxford, 1993). In addition, she has edited two separate volumes with Leslie Kurke of UC-Berkeley: The Cultures within Greek Culture (Cambridge, 2003) and Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics (Cambridge, 1993).

David Braund (Exeter) described The Raft of Odysseus as "a sparkling study of the Odyssey. It offers insightful interpretations of a series of passages from the poem … while presenting also a much larger argument about the interplay of poetic discourse and archaic notions of the world around, including especially travel by sea and the encounters with other cultures, which may follow …. She is not deterred by the consequent need to cross the boundaries which have developed in 'Classics'between the literary, the historical and the archaeological." As Mark Edwards (Stanford emeritus) said of The Poetics of Colonization, which is relevant to all of her exceptional work, she draws us "closer to the mentality of an ancient society, bringing us closer to the ways in which the Greeks, almost unconsciously, looked at a highly significant side of their own history."

Posted On: 10/5/2012