Odysseus’s Eternal Return: Classical Reception in the Post-Hermeneutical Framework of the Materialities of Literature

Abstract

This article discusses classical reception in the post-hermeneutical framework of the Materialities of Literature, taking as case study Theodoros Angelopoulos’s reappre-ciation of Odysseus’s nostos in Voyage to Cythera (1984). Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s concept of art-criticism, this idea of classical reception assumes that a good way to protect the classics from acts of hermeneutical violence is to read them as aesthetic mediations for the making of entirely new artworks —particularly artworks whose materialities allow for more than just a revision of meaning.