Exploration of the mythic concept of Aia, region of the rising sun, and its Hurrian and Luvo-Hittite background, its introduction to European Mycenaean Greeks by the Ur-Aeolians (Ahhiyawans) of Anatolia, and Aeolian Argonautic elaborations.

In his Parekbolai on the Odyssey, the twelfth-century polymath Eustathios of Thessalonike often uses the figure of Odysseus as a starting point to meditate upon crucial themes such as the role of poetry, the duties of the exegete and the qualities of the ideal rhetor. The first part of this chapter focuses on one such passage, where Eustathios analyses the famous ‘linguistic stratagem’ concocted by Odysseus to fool Polyphemus. The sophistic subtlety of Odysseus’ plan leads Eustathios to insert a long excursus on schedography, a rhetorical exercise that was increasingly popular in Komnenian Byzantium. As I argue, in Eustathios’ eyes, the Homeric text is nothing more than a sort of schedographic display ante litteram. More interestingly still, this interpretation provides Eustathios with an ideal pretext for a lesson on rhetorical ‘good taste’. The second part of the chapter examines an extract from John Tzetzes’ Histories in which Odysseus and his adventures again feature as a starting point for reflecting upon contemporary schedography. In this section, I show that, despite some similarities with Eustathios’ ideas, Tzetzes takes a more dogmatic position. As a matter of fact, Tzetzes’ careful depiction of Odysseus might even be interpreted as a subtle criticism of Eustathios’ standpoint.

This chapter pivots to Parmenides’ poem by examining at a more general level the close intertextual connections with Odyssey 12. I then examine in close detail how the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in Parmenides’ Fragment 2 bears a close resemblance to the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12; I also detail important differences between Parmenides’ and Homer’s uses of this disjunction. Finally, I explore the importance of this disjunction for Parmenides’ groundbreaking extended deductive argument and, especially, its role in the practice of demonstration.

This chapter applies the analysis of the preceding chapter to the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12, which I argue serves as a discursive template or blueprint for Parmenides in his ‘Route to Truth’. In addition to building on the notions of the rhetorical schema and types of dependence developed in Chapter 3, I extend my analysis of the discursive architecture governed by the hodos to include the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction which is a central feature of Od. 12.55–126. I also show how the hodos in Odyssey 12 has distinctive features – including the use of modally charged negation and unusually lengthy description sections followed by argumentatively rich units of text – which link it to Parmenides’ poem but differentiate it in crucial ways from other texts and phenomena, including general patterns of Homeric deliberation, polar expressions, the crossroads in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the so-called Orphic gold tablets.

“Paris Profanely Illuminated” explores the “Circe” episode’s relation to 1920s Paris. It situates “Circe” at the origins of the Surrealist movement, showing the influence on the episode of the first Surrealist play, Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and the influence of the episode on the first Surrealist novel, Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris. Tracing the influence of Joyce’s sentient thinking, it reexamines Benjamin’s reception of Surrealism, uncovering the influence of Joyce’s materially embedded reflection on the literary and conceptual experiments of a theorist who struggles with the nature of theory following the collapse of critical distance. The chapter examines Benjamin’s conceptions, in his 1929 essay “Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” and the Arcades Project, of the profane illumination and the body-image space. It argues for the relevance of the nonrational, sensual modes of engagement Benjamin describes in the Arcades Project for the interpretation of Finnegans Wake.

“Paris Re-envisioned” explores what Joyce called the “exploding visions” of the “Circe” episode, composed after his return to Paris in 1920. While the episode has usually been read as staging Bloom’s repressed desires, “Paris Re-envisioned” argues that its visionary form presents the fantastical development of thought in Nighttown, a heightened and totalized version of the city under capitalism. As he presents the ensnaring of human productive powers in structures of profit., Joyce adapts elements from nineteenth-century visionary texts: the play-script form of Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the hallucinatory paralogic of the commercial Paris of Nerval’s Les Nuits d’Octobre and Aurelie, où La Rêve et la vie, and the mode of visionary farce of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer. The chapter shows that the possibility of political and social transformation is tied, in Nighttown, to a domination of nature, manifested in a male use of female bodies, but that Bloom’s sexual desires deviate into nonprocreative, nonheterogenital activities. In an exchange with a Nymph, who is a comic embodiment of the disinterested, autonomous artwork, Bloom defends a transient, relational, and sensual exploration of the “various joys we each enjoy.”