Odysseus himself who returns to Ithaca in triumph after twenty years of wandering, is clearly a man with unsurpassed virtues and achievements which shows that the society of Greece after the "Dark Age" expected a great deal from its men and women which entitled them to a certain level of social recognition for their adherence to excellence and virtue or social disgrace for their personal failings. Thus, under the conditions set forth by these codes and values, any other type of life was seen as contemptible if its central goal was not the pursuit of excellence and the social fame that usually accompanies it (Connolly, 256)
At the same time, the proto-picaresque structure of the Odyssey enables any adaptor to present a series of astonishing set-pieces: this is no less true of Joyce's Ulysses (in which the episodes become showcases for stylistic tours-de-force) than it is of O Brother, with its series of large-scale sequences (the Klan rally, the flood) each filmed with its own specific and appropriate visual aesthetic, to which Ebert is presumably referring. This mixture of different elements is made possible by the episodic structure, and it is noteworthy that another work which borrows structure from the Odyssey -- Petronius' Satyricon -- has in a punning title, which was meant to recall not just Satyrs (and satyriasis) but also the Latin "satura," meaning a stew-pot in which differing competing elements are thrown together, a "hodge-podge" or olla podrida (Connors ix)
Mayhew is clearly meant to be identified as William Faulkner, a Nobel-prize winning novelist whose work for the studios included noirs like Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945) and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). And the morbid hotel in which Barton faces his writer's block is clearly indebted to another serious novelist turned Hollywood hack, Nathanael West, who managed the Hollywood hotel in which visiting writers were housed (Doom 53)
By focusing on an episodic or picaresque narrative with a hero running towards his wife and from the vengeful god in pursuit the Coens actually follow in the template of an existing method of approaching Homer. Of course picaresque runs the risk of a fragmented narrative without a strong overarching narrative structure: to some degree this was the substance of Roger Ebert's dismissal of O Brother Where Art Thou? On its original 2000 release, when he complained that the film suffers from "the sense of invention set adrift; of a series of bright ideas wondering why they had all been invited to the same film" (Ebert 2000)
Although an epic, it ends with a recognition -- and to a certain degree a reconciliation -- between husband and wife. It is like an epic whose ending comes straight out of the archetypes for the "mythos of comedy," as Northrop Frye once identified them, which classically ends in marital reconciliation -- and as such these approaches to the Odyssey on the part of very different artists allows for an approach to a "comic epic" (Frye 283)
Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me. (Joyce 329)
In Sturges' film a Hollywood director of silly entertainments decides to make a serious film about the Depression called by the same name ["O Brother, Where Art Thou?"]: but because he actually knows only wealth and success, he decides to disguise himself as a hobo and go on the road, eventually ending up in prison. The lesson that the director learns while watching the prisoners laughing uproariously at a church screening of cartoons is that audiences don't want to see their lives depicted in movies: they want to escape for a while (Levine 159-61)
Although the soundtrack quickly shifts to "Big Rock Candy Mountain," which has the equivalent associations of an oral tradition of tall tales, and again seems to suggest not so much the Homeric poems as the bardic tradition that produced them, and that functioned as a sort of mass-media in the days when technology had not yet even advanced as far as writing. Milman Parry was, of course, able to find examples of oral tradition still in the 1930s among Serbian guslars that corresponded to the compositional techniques of Homeric poetry because he saw that Homer "presupposed a different kind of poetry from all that we are familiar with," and sought out ethnographic proof that Homer's stylistic hallmarks were proof of an oral tradition (Parry xxi)
But the Coen Brothers are also certainly aware that Parry's 1933-5 research work -- which falls so close to the 1937 setting of O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- was conducted in a sort of golden age of American ethnography which accompanied the establishment of anthropology as an academic discipline by Franz Boas and Margaret Mead (among others) in the 1920s and 1930s. This newfound curiosity about "folk culture" in the 1930s saw academics and folklorists seek out "old timey" material as avidly as Stephen Root's blind collector of songs does in O Brother, when the Roosevelt administration's New Deal included funding for ethnographers recording folklore and oral narratives in areas like Appalachia and the Ozarks: many recordings not unlike those which comprise the best-selling soundtrack of O Brother were made purely out of anthropological interest, and the Soggy Bottom Boys' "Man of Constant Sorrow" was itself first recorded by folkorists collecting material in Appalachia in 1922 ("O Brother," BBC News, 2002)
Whose vision is it to be, the producer's or the auteur's? It is precisely that Joycean and Modernist impulse that Will Self, in a recent piece for the Guardian surveying the Coens' oeuvre even as it considers their 2011 release True Grit, attributes to O Brother, Where Art Thou? Of the film, Self says "this isn't just a retro-style depression-era chain-gang jailbreak movie, but a retelling of the Odyssey to boot. It's James Joyce with a catchy country soundtrack instead of all that brain-ache wordplay" (Self 2011)
It is due to Joyce, I suggest, that the Coens ultimately choose to expand the Homeric Cyclops episode from the outdoor picnic in which Big Dan Teague clubs McGill and Delmar. Since the Coens are so careful and Dickensian in the naming of their characters, one suspects that they may know that "Teague" is itself an ethnic slur -- within the religious and sectarian conflicts in Ireland, "Teague" or "Taig" has been a dismissive term for Irish Catholics (not unlike "Mick") for well over two centuries, and is still used by Ulster Loyalists (Share 368)
He enjoys life, seeing that he is kept on Calypso's island and somewhat reluctantly accepts the nymph's support, being unable to leave her for seven years. With "his Ithaca refused from favoring Fate" (Homer 301), Odysseus is unable to enjoy his stay in Phaecia, even with the fact that conditions in the land are more than welcoming and Phaecians themselves do not hesitate to provide him with everything he needs
Venus: The Lusiads This is a different type of tale because it deals with a real occasion that has been historically documented. But the author, Camoes, chooses to add the celestial to this story of danger and exploration by a Portuguese sailor named De Gama (Camoes xxxiv)
He talks of her as caught and whining to the other gods trying to get them to let her out. In the end a soliloquy between Apollo and Hermes reveals that Hermes would go through the same torture three times over to lay with Aphrodite one time (Stewart)
¶ … Odyssey Coman writes, in the July 2001 issue of Quadrant, that what gives Homer's "The Odyssey" such an eternal relevance is that it defies definitive analysis, thus it retains a sense of mystery that draws readers in by posing more questions that it give answers (Coman pp)
And like Odysseus, Robert continued his journey. Some critics believe that Odysseus always wanted to leave Calypso, never really intended to stay with her (Marks pp)
I cut the pages. There is a list of mistakes at the end"7 (Ellmann, p
The following passages of our research paper will discuss the Odyssey's protagonist, Odysseus by analyzing his actions as well as his temptation of women, thereby examining the way the role of women is Homeric society is depicted in Homer's epic. What equips Homer's Odyssey with thrill and enlightenment apart from Homer's poetic manner to describe serious things in a lighthearted way is the hero Odysseus of Homer's epic (Odysseus, the Hero)
This shows the biased and full-of-filth-and-disgust kind of an attitude towards women of men belonging to Homeric culture. Hence, Homer in Odyssey uses seductresses as the possible motifs where motifs are "recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes" (Themes, Motifs and Symbols)
"I don't want dirty Japs in my church." Lee protested, "Would it make any difference if I told you we are not Japanese but Korean?" He replied, "What the hell's the difference? You all look alike to me" (Lee 54)