Video: Astrid Erll, Odyssean Travels – A Literary History of Modern Memory
On November 16, Astrid Erll gave a talk with the title “Odyssean Travels – A Literary History of Modern Memory” at the University of Amsterdam’s academic-cultural centre SPUI25. You can watch a video of this talk by clicking here.
In this lecture Astrid Erll addresses the longue durée of cultural memory and shows how – ever since the archaic age – Homer’s Odyssey has been ‘travelling’ across time and space. The Odyssey is a prime example of the transculturality of memory, a text that crosses the divides drawn between ‘East’ and ‘West’ or between Europe and elsewhere. This lecture sets out on an ‘Odyssean journey’ through literary and cultural history in order to show how we can begin to understand the fundamental relationality of all cultural memory – and discuss what this relationality may mean in the present moment. This lecture emerges from a current project (an “Opus Magnum”) funded by Volkswagen Foundation. The project seeks to advance literary and historical memory studies. It focuses on translations, rewritings, and remediations of the Odyssey since the 18th century as well as on discussions of ‘Homer’ as cultural heritage in order to get a deeper sense of the logic of ‘modern memory’.
