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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He likes to reduce, you know, narratives to a kind of four square

Uh whereas I like the

the accidental and the

This sort of squishy parts of narrative that don't fit any kind of model.

So we were sort of at loggerheads from the beginning of the class.

You know, on the first and I had asked him, I said, Well, do you want to participate in the seminar discussion?

He said, No, no, I'm just going to sit and back.

I won't say a word.

And on day one, he was off and running, you know, challenging me, arguing that Odysseus was terrible, that he wasn't a hero.

I couldn't

understand why anyone thought he was a great hero.

He lost all his men.

He cried a lot, which bothered my father a lot.

I remember him telling me one night, he said, I was in the army.

Nobody cried.

So it was a sort of comical setup at the beginning, but it became very profound, actually.

You know, because students, even the most wonderful

earnest hardworking students in college are very young.

So there are certain things about the Odyssey they're not going to be able to understand except at the intellectual level.

Not least what it means to be reunited with people whom you haven't seen for a long time.

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