Odysseus Returns: Reflections on Christopher Nolan’s "The Odyssey"

Panelists: David Elmer, Emily Greenwood, and Jie Li
Moderator: Robin Kelsey

About the Event

Since its release in July, Christopher Nolan’s IMAX film The Odyssey has made as big a splash as any film in recent memory, drawing large crowds to theaters and eliciting vociferous debate among pundits. What are we to make of Nolan’s reworking of this Homeric epic? How does his version adapt the ancient story and shape the narrative through cinematic techniques? What does the film and its reception tell us about our own time and its relationship to the past?

About the Speakers

David F. Elmer is Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard University. A scholar of ancient Greek literature, his primary interests are divided between the Homeric epics and the much later prose narratives commonly referred to as the ‘Greek novels.’ His 2013 monograph, The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad, takes as its starting point certain distinctive formulaic expressions, but it quickly moves to derive from these a set of implications about the way in which the Iliad represents its relation to tradition. He is committed to the view that the Homeric texts are fundamentally and essentially the products of an oral tradition, but has also tried to demonstrate in my work that the traditional language of the poems is not nearly so restrictive nor as ‘automatic’ as a ‘strict Parryist’ view might seem to entail (see, e.g., “The ‘Narrow Road’ and the Ethics of Language Use in the Iliad and the Odyssey”). In his work on the ancient novels, he has been primarily interested in these texts’ generic self-positioning, the models of interpretation they put forward, and the ethical questions they pose. Elmer views the novels as examples of a self-consciously ‘Odyssean’ discourse that implicitly subverts or critiques dominant narrative modes by manipulating narrative techniques and ethical norms.

Emily Greenwood is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She is interested in the plural histories of use that make up the classical tradition of ancient Greece and Rome and reciprocal dialogues between the modern discipline of Classics and unruly histories of reception. She is equally excited by Demosthenes’ use of Thucydides, how postcolonial literatures recycle Greek myths, and what classical philology can teach us about the grammar of being human in contemporary America. As a classicist, Greenwood considers herself responsible for knowledge of and about the ancient Greek works that she studies, and for reimagining the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome against different horizons. Her research spans ancient Greek literature (especially historiography), classical reception studies, translation studies, intellectual history, postcolonial studies, and Black Studies. She is the author of two books: Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century and Thucydides and the Shaping of History. She has also co-edited two volumes, Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (co-edited with Barbara Graziosi), and Reading Herodotus: A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories (co-edited with Elizabeth Irwin).

Jie Li is the Ford Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies and an affiliate in Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. As a scholar of literary, film, and cultural studies, her search interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined for demolition. Her second monograph, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts, including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums. Li has co-edited a volume entitled Red Legacies: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution. Her current book project, Cinematic Guerrillas: Maoist Propaganda as a Spirit Medium explores film exhibition and reception in socialist China, including movie theatres and open-air screenings, projectionists and audiences, as well as memories of revolutionary and foreign films. Her other research projects include a transnational film history of Manchuria and a cultural history of noise in modern China.

Robin Kelsey is the Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University. From 2016 to 2024, he served as Dean of Arts & Humanities, and prior to that he served as Chair of the Department of History of Art & Architecture. He has also served as President of the Harvard College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and, for over a decade, Chair or Co-Chair of the Harvard University Committee on the Arts. In 2018 he was selected to represent the faculty of the University at the installation of Lawrence Bacow as Harvard’s 29th President. He holds a PhD from Harvard and a JD from Yale Law School and has practiced law in California. A specialist in the histories of photography, modernism, and American art, Professor Kelsey has published on such topics as the role of chance in photography, geographical survey photography, landscape theory, ecology and historical interpretation, picture theory, and the nexus of art and law. He is the author of two books: Photography and the Art of Chance and Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890. With Blake Stimson, he co-edited a book entitled The Meaning of Photography.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of the Classics and the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University.