Word: iliad
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...fictitious Beacham University, a liberal arts college with a hundred-year tradition of the second-rate. Its off-centerpiece, Billy Williams, literally starts off on the wrong foot by stepping on the college master's dachshund at a cocktail party. He writes a term paper on the Iliad titled "The Shoes of the Greeks," falls for a coed named Zizi Zanzibar and takes Chinese so he can know "something hardly anyone else knew, except for several hundred million Chinese people." Woody Allen would recognize the type...
King Priam (1961) borrowed from the Iliad to examine moral choices in a time of war. The Knot Garden (1970) sorted out a maze of sexual and psychological bonds against a backdrop of freedom fighting, racism and analysis...
...volumes of the best fiction you always wanted to read will not be acted out at center court; nor will Professor Emeritus John Finley deliver a lecture on the Iliad. In fact, you won't see aspiring Commencement Day speakers expatiate in Latin, either...
Myth is not dead. It has just taken a job in the movies. Hitchcock is our Homer, Gone With the Wind is our Iliad, and, taken together, a hundred cowboy movies make up the Odyssey of the Late Show. Hollywood's images have become the myths of the 20th century, and somewhere in the depths of our unconscious are mingled words and pictures from the real and the reel: Abraham Lincoln and Raymond Massey, George Patton and George C. Scott, Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand...
...some of these later writings, Jaynes finds laments for the lost bicameral world. He notes that the Odyssey, probably coming at least 100 years after the Iliad, features "the wily Odysseus, the first modern hero, picking his way through a ruined and god-weakened world." In Hindu literature, the unconscious writings of the Veda give way to the subjective Upanishads, and in the Old Testament, the voices of Yahweh and prophets grow silent, replaced by subjective men wrestling with unanswered questions...