SPECIAL: Pasolini's THE RETURN, with Homerist Barbara Graziosi

Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

(Spoiler alert! This episode is jam-packed with plot spoilers for THE RETURN.) Homeric scholar Barbara Graziosi joins me in the Lesche to discuss Umberto Pasolini's THE RETURN, a film dramatization of the second half of the Odyssey starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope.
About our guest
Barbara Graziosi is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at Princeton, holding the C. Ewing Chair of ancient Greek. Graziosi attended Oxford University (Corpus Christi College B.A. and MSt in Classics) and Cambridge University (Ph.D. in Classics) and taught at Oxford, Reading, and Durham before joining the faculty at Princeton in 2018. She also held various visiting positions in Italy. She has written widely on ancient Greek literature (especially Homer) and its reception, as well as more autobiographical pieces on how we make ancient literature our own. Her latest books are Homer (OUP 2018) and Classics, Love, Revolution: The Legacies of Luigi Settembrini, with Andrea Capra (OUP 2024).
Ancient texts
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
Also mentioned
Emily Wilson's discussions of the murder of the "disloyal" enslaved women in Odysseus' household -- and the sexual politics of translation. See, e.g., Wilson's New Yorker article: "A translator's reckoning with the female characters of the Odyssey" (Dec. 18, 2017).
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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!
Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius
This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
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