The Week the Canon Got Complicated
Elias Canetti was born on July 20, 1905 – a useful birthday to mark when the week’s reading converged so hard on the question of whose stories get told, who gets silenced for telling them, and what the Western literary tradition has always been willing to excuse in the name of great art. Rebecca Solnit, writing on the Odyssey and the long habit of erasing women from the Western literary tradition, put it plainly: “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.” It’s a sentence that lands differently when Christopher Nolan has an Odyssey adaptation in the pipeline and Homer is, improbably, having a moment.
MJ Franklin, writing for The New York Times, took on the marketing machinery now built around a 3,000-year-old epic – the fresh covers, the new translations pitched as urgent, the sense that publishers are repackaging antiquity as contemporary relevance. Separately, a Homerist writing for Hyperallergic weighed in on Nolan’s film adaptation. The Odyssey has rarely needed this much help selling itself, which raises a question the week didn’t quite answer: who is the new packaging actually for?
Women, Silence, and Why Retellings Keep Returning
The argument for centering women in Odyssey retellings – made this week on Lit Hub – isn’t really an argument about Homer. It’s an argument about how long certain omissions have been treated as structural rather than chosen. Solnit’s piece frames the canonical Western literary tradition as one built partly on the silencing of women; the retellings proliferating now are, in that reading, less creative license than overdue correction.
Fanny Howe’s posthumous collection This Poor Book surfaces in a related register. David Schurman Wallace, writing for Poetry, circles the problem of creative urgency at the end of a life: “What to do with a still-living creative impulse at life’s end, even when it feels like there’s nothing left to say?” It’s a different kind of silencing – internal, biological, unresolved – and Wallace doesn’t pretend to answer it cleanly.
Ana Bell’s interview in The New Republic is the week’s sharpest entry in the category of state-imposed literary silence, and it’s not a metaphor. Her brother, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, received a 30-year federal prison sentence for moving a box of zines. “If you were going to tell me that the contents of the box, the zines, the stickers, the poetry, that’s the crime,” Bell said, “then we have a bigger problem here, which is free speech.” The specificity of that sentence – 30 years, a box, zines – is difficult to absorb as anything other than what it is.
The week also brought a Colson Whitehead interview with Natalie Weiner at Defector, in which Whitehead reflected on seven years of writing about New York in a particular mode: “I did love New York, but I love New York more now after writing about it for seven years in this certain kind of way.” Brief, but it lands. The relationship between place and literary obsession – how the writing changes the writer’s relationship to the subject – is rarely put so straightforwardly.
AI, Asimov, and the Problems Machines Leave Open
Nina Beguš and Nicole Oliva, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, took on Isaac Asimov and what his fiction did and didn’t prepare us for. Their argument is worth quoting in full: “Asimov provided us with no keys for encountering machines because the encounter is not a problem we cleanly inhabit and then just as cleanly delete.” The formulation is precise. Asimov gave readers laws, hierarchies, and robot psychology, but the actual friction of living alongside intelligent machines – socially, ethically, legally – is messier than his frameworks allowed. Meanwhile, Slate ran a piece asking what standardized testing is worth in the age of AI, a question that doesn’t resolve neatly either.
April Dávila went somewhere more immediately practical in her Lit Hub Craft piece: the neuroscience of writer’s block, including what writers can actually do about it. Romance fiction, according to a separate Lit Hub piece this week, turns out to be a credible jump-start for stalled creative work – which is either genuinely useful or deeply ironic depending on how seriously you take genre hierarchies. The AI question and the block question aren’t unrelated. If AI tools can generate prose on demand, what exactly is blocked when a human writer can’t write?
Canons, Lost Worlds, and the First American Gothic
Richard Fallon, writing for the Public Domain Review, examined Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland alongside the literary genre of lost worlds – a category that tends to reveal as much about the anxieties of its era as about any imagined geography. Ed Simon’s piece in The Paris Review took on Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, often identified as the first American Gothic novel – a designation that carries its own canon politics, given how much early American fiction by women and Indigenous writers has been systematically excluded from “firsts.”
Oscar Duffield, at Asymptote, reviewed recent English translations of two eighteenth-century epic poems originally composed in Gaelic, a reminder that the Anglophone canon’s gaps are as much a function of translation economics as of literary merit. Robert Zaretsky, writing for The American Scholar, took a different approach to canonical difficulty – Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which Beckett himself insisted “strove to avoid definition.” Zaretsky’s summary of that evasion is exact: “This strategy of avoidance leaves us to gaze at a landscape void of meaning, one that by turns is the source of our bemusement and amusement.”
Carey Baraka’s piece for Equator revisited The Gods Must Be Crazy, identified as the most successful African movie ever made. If the week had a thread, it was the question of which texts get to become canonical and why – Homer repackaged by publishers, Gaelic epics waiting decades for English translation, the first American Gothic still fighting for its designation. Steven W. Thrasher, writing at Lit Hub Politics, examined the Democratic coalition emerging around criticism of Israel, from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to Brad Lander – a political canon in the process of forming, with all the exclusions that entails. Meanwhile, educators in Jefferson County, Mississippi, are apparently doing something right in the middle of a national literacy crisis, per Wired, though the piece stops short of offering it as a model.
The alt text piece may be this week’s sleeper. Lit Hub Technology ran an argument that writing image descriptions for screen readers is a form of literary translation – not accessibility compliance, but actual translation work, with the interpretive stakes translation always carries. It is a small reframing, but a durable one. Daniel Sanchez Estrada is serving 30 years for a box of zines while the literary internet debates which version of the Odyssey is most relevant. Both of those facts are true at the same time.
