Here and now, a common place, a communal space for you and me to meet, converse, and part ways. This nomadic home stretches wrapping itself around a manifold of topological metaphors, tracing the many turns and twists of the text. The first move is positioning myself, then passing, and as I pass, I effect the grid.
This thesis navigates the contemporary reimaginings of Homer’s Odyssey through the lens of posthuman theory, affect studies, and computational analysis. At its center orbit two radical retellings: Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018) and Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007). Miller’s novel gives voice to the immortal witch-goddess, transforming her from Homer’s episodic enchantress into a complex subject navigating divine politics, mortal entanglements, and the burden of eternal life. Mason’s metafictional collection fractures the epic into forty-four variations, each offering alternative trajectories through quantum possibilities of myth—Odysseus as amnesiac, as coward, as cipher in an infinite textual game.
These contemporary works are read alongside and through multiple translations of Homer’s Odyssey, each rendering offering its own interpretive lens: Emily Wilson’s groundbreaking translation that strips away centuries of masculine amplification; Daniel Mendelsohn’s scholarly yet accessible version that bridges ancient and modern sensibilities; Peter Green’s philologically rigorous rendering; Robert Fagles’s poetically muscular interpretation; and A.T. Murray’s Loeb Classical edition, revised by George E. Dimock, providing the Greek-English parallel text that anchors this comparative study. Each translation becomes not merely a version but a theoretical position, revealing how the act of translation itself participates in the ongoing remaking of epic tradition.
A computational analysis of noun frequency distributions across Homer, Mason, and Miller, mapping “agent-prints” that reveal how contemporary retellings negotiate their relationship with Homeric authority through linguistic patterns invisible to traditional hermeneutics.
An ongoing theoretical essay exploring how contemporary retellings move beyond the arboreal model of literary tradition toward rhizomatic networks, where influence becomes not inheritance but sympoiesis—a making-with that creates new configurations exceeding both contemporary and classical elements.
This appendix presents a fluid, multidimensional archive of Homeric retellings, especially the Odyssey. Also includes translations and iteration in other media.
This online supplement extends beyond the constraints of the printed thesis, embracing the very principles it theorizes. As a living document, it remains open to revision, expansion, and collaborative engagement—embodying the rhizomatic, networked understanding of textual relationships that the thesis explores. Here, the digital format allows for ongoing development of concepts, computational visualizations, and theoretical elaborations that exceed the boundaries of traditional academic form.
The space itself performs the posthuman methodologies it discusses: distributed, multiple, and always in the process of becoming. Just as the contemporary retellings studied here remake Homer through their engagement, this digital supplement remakes the thesis through each reading, each visit, each traversal of its hyperlinked pathways.
Last updated: September 2025