What We're Reading This Week: The Classics Under New Light

By Andy — 2026-07-27 — Literary News

Rebecca Solnit is writing about the Odyssey. It is not a celebration.

The piece appeared this week, and what got quoted everywhere was this: "Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture." Not ambiguous. Not hedged. Not something you can argue is being taken out of context. It's what she actually means to say.

The timing is less accident than symptom.

A new Odyssey film just dropped—Christopher Nolan's version, which means it costs money and looks expensive and will be in conversation with itself for months. And Solnit uses that moment to ask the obvious question we never quite ask: what are we celebrating when we celebrate Homer? What story are we actually inheriting? The women in that text are either voiceless, raped, or both. Mary Beard wrote years ago about "the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to 'shut up'; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public" — and it's Telemachus in the Odyssey. That's the Western literary tradition opening its doors. That's the welcome mat.

Actually, that's not quite right.

The welcome mat is for one kind of reader. For another it's a warning. And we're only now noticing the distinction in writing about it.

Meanwhile, Elias Canetti was born on July 25, 1905, which means this is his birthday week—a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist and Nobel laureate who spent his life thinking about power, crowds, and the individual's impossible position within them. He won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". His most famous book, Crowds and Power, is basically an entire philosophy built on the question: what happens when you're one person and everybody else is everyone else?

It's less obviously feminist than Solnit's argument. But it's the same anxiety underneath. Both are looking at structures that swallow voices.

The conversation about canon is changing. Not everywhere, not evenly, something like that—but the conversation is absolutely changing. Franklin Foer published How Soccer Explains the World in 2004, a book that tried to read global politics through sport, and it was a bestseller because Americans were hungry for a framework. Foer uses the sport to examine globalization — and finds in many places, tribal loyalties still exist. Same move, different register: look at the popular thing and see what it's actually about.

Literature does this to itself now. We look at the Odyssey and ask: what is this really about? And when you ask that question honestly, the answer isn't always comfortable. The canonical text doesn't remain canonical just by existing. It remains there because people choose to keep looking at it, and they have to keep making a case. The case gets harder when you admit what you're looking at.

This week in publishing, that case is being remade.