What's Homer to Us? Recent Anglophone Reception of the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent Anglophone works (American, Canadian, and British) that take the Homeric epics or the Trojan cycle as their point of departure have common themes that reflect the preoccupations and discontents of our contemporary civilization. In a wide variety of media—from plays to graphic novels, from lyric poetry to short stories—they emphasize what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “centrifugal” aspects of the epics: those aspects that, rather than converging on a single unified meaning, pull the audience in a number of less normative directions. This effect is achieved in several ways: by focusing on alternative outcomes (traditional or newly invented) to that of the canonical texts; by privileging the focalization of minor characters; and by emphasizing the “realistic” aspects of the originals, i.e., their inclusion of unheroic and even disreputable details. Among the works to be discussed are An Iliad, a play by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare; Memorial, a book of poetry by Alice Oswald; The Penelopiad, a novel by Margaret Atwood; and The Lost Books of the Odyssey, billed as a novel but more like a collection of short stories, by Zachary Mason.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".