The Ulysses Theme

Oedipus still dominates the psychoanalytic imagination, though Ulysses is a more central to Western tradition, from Virgil, Dictys, and Dante, the medieval and Renaissance Troy tales of Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Joachim du Bellay to the twentieth-century literary adaptations by James Joyce and Nikos Kazantzakis. Stanford’s delightfully readable and erudite, survey of the Ulysses figure revolutionizes conventional accounts of this hero. For here is a Ulysses with closer ties to wife, mother, nymphs, and goddesses than his fellow warriors, a faithful husband who dallies with seductive enchantresses, a man of valor who wins by deceit—the Trojan Horse. In his brilliantly challenging foreword, “The Classicist and the Psychopath,” Charles Boer brings the hero’s wanderings up to the twenty-first century by examining the strange fascination of academics with Ulysses and exposing the peculiar prejudices that are hidden in Classical scholarship.