A must for all interested in higher learning and its blessings as well as its pitfalls. Highly recommended for graduate students, scholars, and teachers. In Deneen's well-woven tale, the afterlife of Odysseus in the classics of political theory becomes an avenue into the heart of contemporary debate about our deepest roots and our highest aspirations.
When all is said and done, one of the most compelling voices in this debate turns out to be Deneen's. Like the Homeric original, his is an odyssey that moves inward, toward self-knowledge. For today's world, Deneen's Odyssey speaks tellingly to major tensions between self and community, particularity and universality, place and peregrination, the mastery of and integration with nature. All this in a book at once serious and engrossing. It is an enlightening and an enlightened odyssey through and in political theory and a journey well worth taking with him.
Strong, Professor of Political Thought and Philosophy, University of Southampton The Odyssey of Political Theory is based on a powerful idea, which, once articulated, seems so obvious that one wonders that the book was only just written. The tradition of the West begins with Homer, in whose Odysseus the human problem at the heart of poltical theory is embodied.
For Patrick Deneen understanding Odysseus means understanding a cluster of dualisms: For this reason, understanding Odysseus has preoccupied thinkers as various as Plato, Rousseau, Vico, Adorno, and Horkheimer. By way of Odysseus, The Odyssey of Political Theory inquires at once into the essence of poltical theory and into the history of how that essence has been understood; it is an intelligent, elegantly written, and yet altogether unpretentious book.
Michael Davis, Sarah Lawrence College This elegant study subtly unpacks for us the astonishing richness of Homer's Odyssey , reminding us that the great books are great precisely because they never cease to cast new light on the mysteries of human existence. McClay, University of Oklahoma [Deneen's] imaginative work offers something for historians, classicists, and political theorists alike, and provides a compelling demonstration of the enduring 'relevance' of an ancient myth which he claims the more ignorant amongst post-modern theorists have tried to remove from American universities altogether.
Political Studies Review Deneen's book is exeptional both in its command of the scholarly literature and in its philosophical sensitivity. Anyone who doubts the greatness of Homer's Odyssey should read Deneen's book and report back.
Unlike much political theory, it never hectors, badges, or insists. It is just elegantly persuasive and completely compelling. Polis The great benefit of Deneen's book is the way in which it inspires a reader to return to the original texts. The Review of Politics This is a brilliant essay, traversing a vast intellectual space with admirable ease and fairness.
Product details
Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? This path-breaking and eloquent analysis of The Odyssey, and the way it has been interpreted by political philosophers throughout the centuries, has dramatic implications for the current state of political thought. This important book offers readers original insights into The Odyssey and it provides a new understanding of the classic works of Plato, Rousseau, Vico, Horkheimer, and Adorno.
Through his analysis Patrick J. Deneen requires readers to rethink the issues that are truly at the heart of our contemporary 'Culture Wars,' and he encourages us to reassess our assumptions about the Western canon's virtues or viciousness. Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Our lives are made up of arrivals and departures, comings and goings, entrances and exits.
Originally composed as an interlude at the beginning of Act III of the oratorio Solomon, this piece of music has acquired a life of its own, becoming a popular choice at weddings to accompany the entrance of the bride.
Probably the most significant arrival we experience is birth. The parents in First Child by Vernon Scannell are also anxious about the impact that this new arrival will have on their lives, but although these fears are largely assuaged once the child is born, they are replaced by other concerns about the well-being of this vulnerable infant in a threatening world.
1 customer review
If they survive these dangers, eventually children grow up and leave home. In Autumn, Peter Hammill sings from the point of view of a father, left feeling bewildered and resentful following his children's departure: We may leave our childhood homes behind, but sometimes we return only to find that arriving in a place which used to be so familiar can be uniquely disorienting, an experience described here by Dannie Abse in Return to Cardiff. One of the most celebrated homecomings in European literature is that of Odysseus, finally returning to the island of Ithaca after the decade-long Trojan War and a further ten years of storm-tossed peregrinations around the Mediterranean.
Cavafy encourages the reader to set sail for Ithaca, but cautions us that what we experience on the journey is more important than the eventual arrival at our destination. In The Thought Fox, Ted Hughes conjures up an incarnation of something more abstract travelling inexorably towards him through the night — inspiration.
Similar authors to follow
Some places, such as airports and train stations, are defined by arrival and departure. The final couplet, in its totality of commitment and devotion, equals anything the poet has yet said to the beloved youth, and bears testimony to the immortality of his love. For comments on and description of the rose, in Gerard's Herbal, first published in , and therefore contemporary with the Sonnets, see end of page. The sonnet seems to spring from an accusation of unfaithfulness.
An accusation which the poet denies, using a certain amount of sophistry in the process. He does not deny that he has had other loves, he merely claims that they were nothing in comparison with the great joy of loving what is everything to him, his all, his universe, his rose. Unfortunately these are the excuses of the philanderer throughout the ages, and the formulae of repentance ring even more hollowly than the formulae of prayer repeated in the previous sonnet.
BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Arrivals and Departures
However the game of loving declarations and exchanges must be played over once more, and poetry will make it seem true. And despite the apparent cynicism of some of the arguments, the greater preponderance of the sonnet is devoted to reestablishing the rapport and idealism of the initial love when first they met. The sincerity and devotion of the last two lines redeems the otherwise lame excuses in the eyes of all lovers.
- Solid State Gas Sensors - Industrial Application: 11 (Springer Series on Chemical Sensors and Biosensors)!
- Accessibility links.
- Father For Keeps (Mills & Boon Vintage 90s Modern).
- No Holding Back (Mills & Boon Vintage 90s Modern).
- Navigation.
It is worth pointing out that the separation and 'ranging' here described could have arisen as a result of the youth's absence, rather than any enforced or wilful wandering of the poet. If the Earl of Southampton was the favoured youth, the estrangement could have been caused by his imprisonment in the Tower of London, after the Essex rebellion in , an imprisonment from which he was not released until the accession of James I to the throne.
Such confinement would obviously remove him from contact with his friends, and they would thus have the freedom to roam 'here and there' without excuses having to be made. On Southampton's release the charge of unfaithfulness would then have to be defended, if the former rapture of love was to be renewed. Even if it were the case that in my nature such and such follies reigned supreme, you must never bring yourself to believe that etc. There is a possibility of sexual innuendo in nature, reigned, all, frailties, nothing, preposterous, stained.
Nothing for example was frequently used as a euphemism for female genitalia. He uses universal more frequently, 14 times in all, viz. For what it is worth, eight of the 14 uses occur in the plays written between and I give below an extract from Gerard's Herbal, which gives some idea of the special place that the rose occupied in Elizabethan thought.
The totality of devotion which the concluding couplet implies seems to sweep aside all the apparent sophistry of the preceding arguments.