What Lit Hub Read This Week (And Why Classics Are Darker Than We Think)

By Andy — 2026-07-26 — Literary News

A film about the Odyssey came out. The Tate brothers got arrested.

These two things don't usually connect in conversation, but Rebecca Solnit made them inseparable in her essay this week. She writes about classical literature and how it normalises violence against women, connecting the mythology we teach in schools to the violence we see in courts. Not metaphorically. The actual pattern.

Simple.

What strikes me—and what Solnit circles back to—is how we've inherited Homer and Virgil and everyone else without ever being asked what we inherited. We took the story. We didn't ask what the story took from Penelope, from Cassandra, from the women whose names the Odyssey mentions mainly so someone could hurt them. The essay points out that Telemachus tells his mother to be quiet, to go do women's work, in the very first book. We've been quoting that same instruction for 2,800 years.

That one detail caught me because it's not a sideplot. It's built into the beginning.

Elsewhere in the week's reading, Ed Simon was examining Charles Brockden Brown's *Wieland*, a novel from 1798 that nobody really reads anymore except in university seminars. Brown wrote it as America was still figuring out what America even was. The novel is often considered the first American Gothic novel—before Poe, before Hawthorne. Before we had a tradition to call our own.

What makes it Gothic isn't ghosts or castles.

It's a man who hears voices. He believes they're God. They're actually a ventriloquist playing tricks. By the time he works it out, he's murdered his family. The novel sits in that space between what feels true (divine instruction) and what is actually true (manipulation). Brown wrote this in the 1790s, before we had words like "gaslighting" or "disinformation." He just knew that a person's certainty could destroy everyone around them.

That's more useful than any ghost story, isn't it.

Then there was the piece on Asimov and AI. Actually, that's not quite right—it was more about what Asimov got wrong, or at least incomplete. Asimov built ethics into his robots through the Three Laws: never harm humans, obey them, preserve yourself. Clean logic. Tidy problems. He published *I, Robot* in 1950, a collection of short stories about how machines think.

But the piece this week noted something sharper: Asimov never really gave us a *choice*.

His robots couldn't betray anyone because they were built not to. They had no agency to refuse. The ethical framework wasn't theirs to decide—it was their prison. Which means the whole thing is a bit dishonest about what we actually want from machines. We want them to be good, but only because we've stripped their ability to be otherwise. That's not virtue. That's just slavery with better marketing.

The theme running through everything was the same one, more or less: we inherit stories, systems, laws. We don't examine them as closely as we should. Solnit makes it personal. Brown makes it gothic. Asimov makes it a logic puzzle.

But they're all saying the same thing underneath.