Dr Matthew Ward
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Dr Matthew Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When it comes to the themes of the story, I mean, exactly.
The Odyssey's interested in disguise, recognition, the relationship between lies and truth, the difficulty of telling a simple story, the problem of coming home.
You know, all of these things, as you say, are...
usable and appropriable in our modern period.
Now, the precise configurations of them change, but I think that's precisely why the Odyssey has proved such a rich resource, a rich way of thinking about questions of cultural value, our place in the world, and things like that.
It's because at its core,
You've got a story that's interested in the process of telling stories, that's interested in whether they're true or not, and that's really interested in how you come back to your family and how you return and are reintegrated within and after moments of traumatic violence.
So I think you're exactly right that what that gets you is a kind of a narrative, a set of narrative opportunities that can be used and reused and that always seem to speak in new ways to what our current historical moment is concerned with.
Well, I mean, if I knew the answer to that, I would have written one myself.
But I think part of the answer must be, it is not just, I mean, it is a poem about all these central themes, but it's also a long history of engagement.
You can't read The Odyssey without thinking of Anne Carson or Derek Walcott or James Joyce or Petrarch or, you know, Virgil or Sophocles or whoever.
So one of its values is that it is a long history of engagement.
I think the other reason it's, well, I'll give you one reason I now like to think about it and think with it.
One of the things the Odyssey seems to me to be increasingly about today is the relationship between overconsumption and limits.
So we've talked about how the suitors are sat in the house of Odysseus eating, eating, eating without producing food.
And increasingly, I think the Odyssey's concern with getting rid of people who consume too much might have something to say to where we're living at the moment.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, people have often said that the Iliad was the favourite poem of the kind of, you know, 1800s.
But once we reached our modern, postmodern period, the Odyssey, with its complications, with its language, with its lies, became much more important to us as a text that talks about the way we experience and think about the world.
I mean,
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