Item Infomation
| Title: | Prospects of an Odyssean homecoming for Percy Jackson after his sojourn in Lotus Hotel: 75 minutes of intergenerational conversations with Rick Riordan |
| Publisher: | Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies |
| Description: | The minutes that I have written up for this post are a record of 75 real minutes of conversations during “Hour 10” of the Harvard College course “The Ancient Greek Hero,” which took place “live” on October 13, 2020. A video-audio recording is posted here, with permission from the participants. For this “hour” at Harvard, I as the professor-in-charge chose as the main topic for conversation the celebrated story of a visit to the Land of the Lotus-Eaters in Rhapsody 9 of the Odyssey, where the nostos or ‘homecoming” of the hero Odysseus and his companions is endangered by a loss of noos or ‘consciousness’. But what is really the danger here? In other words, why is the consciousness of homecoming really so dangerous for someone to lose? The answer is simple, despite all the complexities of the story: we must at all costs avoid the loss of the very idea of home—a loss that results from eating the sweet fruit of a plant known in the Odyssey as the lotus. In the previous post of 2020.10.09, I had invited Rick Riordan, author of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, volume 1, Lightning Thief (2005), to comment on the story, in the light of his retelling of that story in the first volume of the Percy Jackson series. In the post for now, we return to Rick’s retelling, in the context of “Hour 10” of the Harvard College course. During this “hour,” Rick was an invited participant in an animated conversation not only with me and with a panel of Harvard College students but also with an intergenerational assembly of other interested readers. In the write-up that follows, as I already noted, I will be presenting minutes, written by me, of the real minutes that we all spent together. During the 75 minutes of that “hour,” we started by concentrating on the Homeric version of the myth about the Lotus-Eaters, and then we followed up by comparing Rick’s version. A dominant theme that extended from one version to the other was the picturing of a historical event, the invention of ether, as highlighted by Rick in minute 14 below. The Classics Version of Record |
| URI: | http://lib.yhn.edu.vn/handle/YHN/463 |
| Other Identifiers: | Nagy, Gregory. 2020.10.16. "Prospects of an Odyssean homecoming for Percy Jackson after his sojourn in Lotus Hotel: 75 minutes of intergenerational conversations with Rick Riordan." Classical Inquiries. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37366769 |
| Appears in Collections | Tài liệu ngoại văn |
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