Hosted by the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, the University of Chicago. Lectures are offered at 12:15pm on the first Friday of every month except July, in the Claudia Cassidy Theater of the Chicago Cultural Center. Free admission. Click here for complete details.

Katia Mitova, Modern Retellings of the Odyssey

March 6, 12:15pm

Why retell a good story, especially if it is already written down? To internalize it? To question it? To give it a new life in a new context? The answer seems easy: all of the above. Once we look into the specific retellings of a story as famous and loved as Homer’s Odyssey, however, we realize that each retelling is above all a rethinking of the ambiguities that surround Odysseus’ cunningness and troubled journey home and Penelope’s patience and faithfulness. The lecture takes into account recent novels such as Audrie Niffeneger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010).