The shadow of Ulysses

the long version

Piero Boitani's study is a perceptive and imaginative exploration of the myth of Ulysses in a range of western literature from Homer to Joyce. Simultaneously ancient and modern, the figure of Ulysses is an ideal observation-point from which to measure the similarities and differences between the otherness ('alterity') of the past and the 'modernity' of the present. Boitani sees Ulysses as a figure which every culture is free to interpret, according him values rooted on the one hand in the mythical qualities of Odysseus as a character, and on the other in the ideals, problems, and philosophical, ethical, and political horizons of the individual civilization. The Shadow of Ulysses follows the evolution of the sign through the ages, returning continuously as it does so to problems of intertextuality, interpretation, and reading. The sign appears as a 'shadow' both because by means of it, poetry describes humanity's journey to the other world of death, and because, in a figural connotation, Ulysses 'foreshadows' Columbus's and Vespucci's historical voyages to the New World. Among the writers discussed in this book are Homer and Dante, Tasso and Tennyson, Leopardi, Poe, and Baudelaire, as well as Conrad, Levi, Joyce, and Borges. Informed by modern critical theory, Piero Boitani's elegant work displays deep learning as well as illuminating and enlivening readings of a wide range of references as it describes the incarnations of Ulysses.