Mythos and Voice: Displacement, Learning, and Agency in Odysseus' World

Underwood, Charles

ISBN 10: 1498534244 / ISBN 13: 9781498534246

Published by Lexington Books, 2018

About this Item

Underwood, Charles. Mythos and Voice : Displacement, Learning and Agency in Odysseus' World. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. Hardback. New. "Charles Underwood has re-envisioned the Odyssey as an extended meditation on human development and situated learning . The result is one of the deepest and most intriguing books about the Odyssey in years" (Richard Martin). RightWayUp Books aims to provide accurate and detailed descriptions. All images are of the actual book for sale - no stock images are ever used. Thank you for looking at this listing.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1629751563934

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Mythos and Voice: Displacement, Learning, and Agency in Odysseus' World
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1498534244
• ISBN 13: 9781498534246
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literary criticism
  • Myths and legends

About this title

Synopsis

This book focuses on mythos and voice in the Odyssey, to illuminate its characters’ journeys from social displacement through discovery and recovery. Mythos and Voice approaches the Odyssey as a narrative of displacement – a narrative that maps the social displacement of its characters, explores the cognitive consequences of that displacement, and embodies the variable strategies by which those characters learn to resolve their displacement. It is a narrative that also employs and elaborates the characters’ own narratives of displacement as genres enabling them to resist externally imposed definitions of their situations and to redefine and ultimately reclaim their own place in the world, not as it was before their displacement, but as it must be, given the new post-heroic world in which they now live.
The focus on mythos and voice enables readers to approach the study of learning and the acquisition of personal agency in the context of a hazardous world – the cultural world that Odysseus navigates in Homer’s epic poem. With this focus, the author examines interactive processes of human learning in a specific cultural context – the epic universe of Homeric narrative. By ethnographically examining the learning contexts portrayed inHomer’s epic, Mythos and Voice elucidates an Archaic Greek view of human learning through examples that show how the author(s) of the Odyssey envisioned and dramatized displacement, learning and agency in the epic work. The book focuses on aspects of Homeric cognition as they cumulatively develop among key characters within the Odyssey’s inventive narrative structure. In this way, Mythos and Voice describes a culturally specific “theory” of learning and development – a perspective that proved compelling in the pre-classical and classical Greek world, even as it does to readers now.

About the Author

Charles Underwood is executive director of University-Community Links in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley.