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The odyssey criticism
Critical analysis of the odyssey
Critical analysis of the odyssey
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Comparing Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses
This essay will analyze the style, genre and plots of the "Hades" episodes found in Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses. Before entering this small treatise, it is important to understand the etymology of the word Hades, since it is the setting for both Joyce and Homer (of course in Homer's case, he was speaking of the literal aidhs and Joyce was referring to the graveyard, where Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam and "broods about the death of his only son "). Homer's use of the word Hades was to refer to the abode of the dead or the unseen nether world; where we find Odysseus searching for Tiresias, to find out how to return to Ithaca safely. The Homeric Hades is not the modern view of Hell, mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. In fact, C.S. says "In real Pagan belief, Hades was hardly worth talking about; a world of shadows, of decay. Homer . . . represents the ghosts [in Hades] as witless. They gibber meaninglessly until some living man gives them sacrificial blood to drink. "
Comparing the style: Objective vs. Existential
Eight months prior to the first publication of Ulysses , Joyce penned: "If you want to read Ulysses you had better first get or borrow from a library a translation in prose of the Odyssey of Homer. " Joyce's recommendation is a must in order to get the full meaning of his work. A good commentary would also be found useful in exegesis. Most people, ". . . opening Ulysses at random are easily scarecrowed away by the first shock of [its] queer mixture of vulgar slang and metaphysical obscurity. " I must admit that my first reading of Ulysses was horrifying. I am a lover of the western class...
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...oehrich, Rolf. The Secret of Ulysses. (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969)
Schutte, William, "An Index of Recurrent Elements in Ulysses: "Hades". James
Joyce Quarterly. Spring 1977: (Vol. XIV, No. 3)
Skeat, Walter. Concise Dictionary of English Etymology. (Great Britain:Wordsword, 1993)
Smith, William. Wordsworth Classical Dictionary. (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1996)
Smith, Paul. A Key to the Ulysses of James Joyce. (New York: Covici Friede, 1934)
Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses. (North Carolina: UNC Press, 1968)
The student may wish to begin the paper with the following quote:
"I hold this book [Ulysses] to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. "
T.S. Elliot
this, for once the suitors are gone Odysseus is free to reclaim is post in
Campbell, Joseph. Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
James Joyce author of Dubliners, is a book which examines the everyday life of people who live in Dublin. In this intimate portrayal of Dubliners, Joyce writes short stories about the individuals in Irish society. In Dubliners many characters feel the pressure of society, and show their desires to escape. In the stories “Eveline”, “Counterparts” and “The Dead”, the themes of individuals v. society and journey through escape are present. In each story there is a powerful person present that controls a particular person or situation. In Dublin jobs are very important, since they control the social standing in their society. Dublin itself is a major issue to the characters in Dubliners; they wrestle with the ideas of being able to escape.
In book eight of Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus is on the island of the Phaeacians and is waiting to return home to Ithaca. Meanwhile, Alcinous, the Phaeacian king, has arranged for a feast and celebration of games in honor of Odysseus, who has not yet revealed his true identity. During the feast, a blind bard named Demodocus sings about the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at Troy. The song causes Odysseus to start weeping, so Alcinous ends the feast and orders the games to begin. During dinner after the games, Odysseus asks Demodocus to sing about the Trojan horse and the sack of Troy. This song too causes Odysseus to break down and cry. Homer uses a dramatic simile to describe the pain and sorrow that Odysseus feels as he recalls the story of Troy.
Free will can be wholly responsible for my motivation to write this paper. I was really hoping for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to come out in time to be used as the film for analysis, but to my disappointment, it opened in theaters the day this paper was due. So, I chose to write instead on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The films, though not really about our freedom to choose, inspired me to look into the topic of whether it is in our nature to willingly choose the path of evil to gain personal fulfillment. Our motives are not as clear cut as the archetypes portraying good and evil are in the film, but part of me thinks their embodiment in such fantastical creatures as elves, hobbits, orcs, and demons say something about the human desire to approach our weaknesses with understanding and strengths with humility. For if we learn from our mistakes we may grow stronger, while withdrawing from our arrogance, might we refrain from ruling out perfectly possible and desirable changes as impossible. This is the essence of our freedom.
Homer. The Odyssey: Fitzgerald Translation. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.
The vision of the underworld portrayed in Dante’s Inferno and The Odyssey share many similarities. Both Dante and Odysseus confidently travel to the underworld because a woman, with whom they have had an intimate instructs them to. In The Odyssey, Circe instructs Odysseus to “make [his] own wa...
There has long been a fashion among critics and historians, including Sir James Frazier and Graham Hancock, to insist upon taking the account of Odysseus' voyage to Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey at near face-value as a description of people and places familiar to a Greek audience of Homer's day. Both linguistics and comparative history have been employed to discover exactly how accurately this originally oral epic conveys this gritty realism. Something, however, is not right with this purely empiric approach. What is missing is an examination through the lens of ancient religious practices. Surely a literary work so teeming with deities-wise Athena, spiteful Poseidon, impish Hermes, omnipotent Zeus-deserves such study.
Baym, Franklin, Gottesman, Holland, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
To me, Ulysses was a necessary evil, in that I thought that I would not be able to call myself a literature student unless I had read the entire novel. While my journey through Ulysses was laden with moments of bewilderment, exasperation, and self-pity, I was able to power my way through the novel with a deeper appreciation for the way James Joyce was able to create a linear story told through a series of non-linear writing styles. In retrospect, the grueling challenge of reading Ulysses made me a better student, in that I was able to grow as a reader by adjusting myself to Joyce’s train-of-thought writing style, and that I could add Ulysses to my personal canon of academic literature.
'Ulysses' is both a lament and an inspiring poem. Even modern readers who are not so familiar with the classics, can visualize the heroic legend of Ulysses, and so is not prepared for what he finds in the poem— not Ulysses the hero but Ulysses the man.
James Joyce's fragment of a novel, Stephen Hero, leaves the reader little room to interpret the text for themselves. The work lacks the narrative distance that Joyce achieves in his later works. Dubliners, a work Joyce was writing concurrently, seemingly employs a drastically different voice. A voice which leaves the reader room to make judgments of their own. Yet it is curious that Joyce could produce these two works at the same time, one that controls the reader so directly, telling not showing , while the other, Dubliners, seems to give the reader the power of final interpretation over the characters it portrays.
treachery among the Gods that is so prevalent in the Iliad, is nowhere to be
Tennyson, Alfred. "Ulysses." The Norton Introduction to Literature. Eds. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. 7th ed.
Pope, Deborah. "The Misprision of Vision: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". James Joyce. vol.1. ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 113-19.