/lit/ - Literature

>>18579071
Not trouble, but there have been tense moments. I reacted with exasperation to a colleague when I heard the Divine Comedy was being doctored in Scandinavia to remove references to Mohammed being in hell. It isn't because I think Mohammed specifically should be said to be in hell, but more of a larger response to the prospect of great literary works being altered - who decides what gets cut, and why? Someone else in the room loudly stated that they thought literary works should 'change with the times'. Thankfully she wasn't an English academic. I also butted heads a few times with my PhD supervisor.

>>18579075
I like Homer a lot. He is in many ways a cipher, like Shakespeare, and like the bard (and later, IMO, Tolstoy in the realm of prose) his works contain 'all of life'. He also gives us our first soliloquy in Western literature. Though his work was clearly the first visible glimpse of a long poetic tradition likely stretching back in some form to Sumerian myth and Gilgamesh, they are in themselves remarkable achievements. The plot of the Iliad is beautiful in its simplicity. I'm not entirely convinced Homer was the sole author of the Odyssey, but it isn't my realm of expertise. I do like that some have sworn Homer had to be a doctor, because of his medically accurate descriptions, and others say he had to have been a sailor because of his geographical accuracy in describing various routes, and others take him for this, or that... Clearly a great soul and expansive mind, reflected in vast works of countless characters that fed the Greek dramatists and later writers for countless years.

>>17107389
In sexual terms? Emma Bovary.
Emotionally? Sonya from W&P