Event Date
BIES invites you to attend
Writing Extensions: Afterlives, Reimaginings, and Inspiration
in conversation with
Madeline Miller & Sarah Van der Laan
Wednesday, February 12 at 5 p.m. CST (3pm PST)
via Zoom
Our virtual series, Writing Extensions, pairs creative writers and scholars whose work takes inspiration from literary texts and their (sometimes messy) influence on later writers for an hour-long virtual session that invites informal conversation followed by audience Q&A.
About award-winning novelist Madeline Miller’s #1 New York Times bestselling novel Circe (2018):
“Miller follows her impressive debut (The Song of Achilles) with a spirited novel about Circe’s evolution from insignificant nymph to formidable witch best known for turning Odysseus’s sailors into swine. . . Weaving together Homer’s tale with other sources, Miller crafts a classic story of female empowerment. She paints an uncompromising portrait of a superheroine who learns to wield divine power while coming to understand what it means to be mortal.” -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About Dr. Sarah Van der Laan’s The Choice of Odysseus: Homeric Ethics in Renaissance Epic and Opera (Oxford University Press, 2024):
The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaissance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.
Sarah Van der Laan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas
