Homer to Joyce

By Wallace Gray

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0025451707
• ISBN13: 9780025451704
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co
• Length: 265 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A solid commentary

Wallace Gray reinterprets major works of the Western tradition, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone of Sophocles, Bacchae of Euripides, Frogs of Aristophanes, Aeneid of Virgil, Tristan of Gottfriend, Inferno of Dante, Essays of Montaigne, King Lear, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, Eliot's The Waste Land , Ulysses of Joyce. Gray is a clear commentator who avoids technical jargon, and readily accessible to the common reader. His commentary is solid but it is not on the same level as Bloom's rereading of the 'Western Canon' Bloom has an originality and brilliance that Gray lacks. Here is an example of his writing at its best., "Aeschylus and Sophocles taught that through suffering comes knowledge. Cervantes, who was working on 'Don Quixote' while Shakespeare was writing King Lear, joins him in leading us back into the world of Euripides 'Bacchae', where out of suffering comes only further suffering. The arrogant and power-hungry young Pentheus, the imaginative and middle- aged Don, and the trusting and wrathful old Lear re all broken on the rack of the world by inflexible gods. All three works present the dark dangters of illusion to the individual, and the terrible consequences of drawing others into that illusion. In reading 'Don Quixote' we should end by worrying about our our laughter at the illusions."

A wonderful book

I did have a great literature professor, and he was Wallace Gray. Professor Gray was a wonderful, brilliant man with clear and unique interpretations of each book. Each essay is straightforward, enlightening, and a pleasure to read. Gray always used to say that books "talk to each other," that reading one book affects the way you read another and that later authors were always aware of the great works of literature that came before. Through his book Gray highlights this phenomenon and really shows his love for each text. As he was one of the foremost authorities of James Joyce in world, his essay on Ulysses is particularly illuminating. If you love the Western canon, do all you can to find this book.

even better than Bloom's How to Read and Why

For the reader who never had a great professor to explain many classic works in our Western canon, this book is a must. Gray, a professor at Columbia who taught humanities for many years, walks the reader through the Odyssey and the Iliad all the way to Swift, Eliot and Joyce with pit stops along the way with Dante, Sophocles, Cervantes etc.... These explanations and explications are extremely well-written and jargon-free. Save yourself a year of tuition and savor this book instead. It's a shame it's out of print.