Literary Week: What Solnit Sees in Homer, and Why Canetti Still Matters

By Andy — 2026-07-26 — Literary News

The internet is doing what it does best this week: rehashing old problems through new lenses.

Lit Hub's weekly roundup led with Rebecca Solnit on classical literature and women. She was direct about it: "Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture." The Odyssey dropped into theatres last weekend, and Solnit noticed something people tend to skip over—that the tradition of Western literature opens with a man telling a woman to 'shut up', starting with Telemachus silencing Penelope. Not subtle. Not accidental.

Most people experience Homer as genius, or homework. They don't sit with the fact that the story works because women stay quiet. Solnit does.

Actually, that's not quite right. She sits with it, then she writes about it, and that writing does something different. It makes the silence impossible to ignore once you've read her words. The woman writing makes the silenced woman visible. That's the whole point, I think.

Meanwhile, Elias Canetti was born this week in 1905—or rather, the internet remembers that he was born on July 25, 1905, in Ruse, Bulgaria, and went on to become a modernist writer and 1981 Nobel laureate. Most readers in the West haven't opened *Crowds and Power*. They know the name. They know he was important. He received his PhD in chemistry but never worked as a chemist, choosing to devote himself to writing instead. There's something almost perverse about that choice—turning down the practical life for the difficult one.

Canetti spent a lifetime thinking about how people move in groups, how power works through bodies, through sound. He watched Vienna burn. He fled fascism. He wrote anyway.

The roundup also revisited Franklin Foer's 2004 bestseller *How Soccer Explains the World*, which analyzes the interchange between soccer and the new global economy. What's interesting isn't the book itself—that's obvious enough. It's the gap between what the book promised and what it delivered. The subtitle is a bit misleading; Foer doesn't really develop a theory of globalization so much as examine how soccer in different countries reveals how international forces affect politics. He travels. He watches. He reports. The neat theory breaks into real people, real stadiums, real violence.

That's the work—not explaining the world, but noticing how messy it is when you look closely.

Somewhere between Solnit's silence and Canetti's crowds and Foer's stadiums, there's a week's worth of literary thinking. None of it offers solutions.