Daniel Mendelsohn

speaker

599 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Daniel Mendelsohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The History of Literature · 817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

People come up to you and they're bald and they're fat and and they say, Oh, we dated.

Or and you think, wait, who is this person?

Right.

You know, you have to have that experience, right?

So this person comes up to you and says, I knew you back when.

And you look at that person, you say, that's ridiculous.

And that's sort of the position Penelope is in.

So both of these things can be true at the same time.

You are still the same person, but time has changed you.

And how do you reconcile that?

And that I think is what the Odyssey is really about.

It's about identity.

you know, a a very current word in literary criticism in a very profound way.

Well, it's hard, you know, it's hard for many students to sort of grasp a polytheistic pantheon in these works, which are works of literature, of course, as characters, you know.

I want to

Answer your question in a kind of by coming in from the side, let's call it.

So one of the interesting things uh since we've been talking about

the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey and the people who embrace them.

One of the interesting thing about the Odyssey is that the gods

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