Abstract: My most intense experience of identification came about when I first read Changrae Lee's 2010 novel The Surrendered . This article explores how that experience of identification, originating in my identity as an Asian American classicist, steered me toward an idiosyncratic and, ultimately, disconcerting reading of the novel. The novel introduces a character named Benjamin Li during a series of chapters set at a missionary school in Manchuria. I viewed Benjamin as the Odysseus of The Surrendered . Lee's nuanced engagement with the mythological tradition remakes twentieth-century conflicts in East Asia in the image of the Trojan War and its aftermath.

Theocritus's Adoniazusae (Idyll 15) has long been recognized as one of his most historically pertinent Idylls, but the complex social dynamics of the narrative frame warrant further investigation. Building on earlier feminist readings of the poem, this study pays careful attention to the characters' comments about ethnicity and gender in order to explore the intersection of these two categories. The concept of intersectionality arose as a means to critique judicial reasoning that relies on solitary, exclusive categorical identities. Crenshaw's foundational studies (1989, 1991) show that judicial decisions often handle race and gender in separation and isolation, and that this "single-axis" approach to identifying categories made it effectively impossible to contemplate the experience of women of color. By applying this method to Idyll 15, we can escape the limitations of the poem's Hellenocentric perspective and consider the poem in terms of the Egyptian gender norms with which it builds an implicit contrast. An intersectional reading of the poem acknowledges that such categories as Greek and Egyptian, women and man, cannot be treated in isolation; rather, they are co-determinative. The seeds of this way of thinking existed already in antiquity in Herodotus's famous ethnography of Egypt (Hist. 2.35–36), which employs an oppositional matrix to relate Egyptian and Hellenic gender norms. This passage remained a touchstone for ancient writers, and was likely familiar to Theocritus and his audience. Despite its clear ethnocentric limitations, Herodotus's account helps reveal the constitutive oppositions of gender and ethnicity that underlie Theocritus's poem. By contrasting the rigid gender roles of the Greek protagonists with the more adaptable gender roles of the native Egyptians, we can reveal a subtle critique of Greek gender itself.

This article explores a tension in the animal epigrams of Anyte of Tegea, the inventor of the animal and pastoral epigram. It argues that, on the one hand, the genre of funerary epigram encourages Anyte to think about animals as individuals, with their own particular personalities, biographies, and interests, as well about the particularity of their relationships with the human companions who speak the epigrams. On the other hand, Anyte's repeated use of the conventions of funerary rhetoric and Homeric and Hesiodic intertextuality, while commemorating the lives of the animal individuals depicted in her epigrams, also abstract from the individuality and animality of the animals that Anyte commemorates. The question of depicting animals as individuals—rather than as tokens of species or as merely functions or commodities in human society—is an increasingly important issue in Animals Studies. This article begins by surveying recent philosophical and ethical positions presented by theorists in Animals Studies and ultimately locates the origin of the question of representing animals as individuals in Derrida's late work The Animal That Therefore I Am. It then proceeds to use this question to pose new, close readings of a selection of Anyte's animal epigrams, asking how she represents animals as individuals, and concludes by claiming that the animal individuals of Anyte's poetry are truly liminal beings: neither pets, nor labor or wild animals, nor thoroughly anthropomorphized persons. It is this complexity in the status of the animals in Anyte's epigrams that makes the poems (and the animals) so compelling and such good examples of the tensions not only in her own poetry but also in discussions about the representation of animals in literature today.

This article explores depictions and perceptions of Helen’s relations with the non-human world. Drawing on the insights of posthumanism, new materialisms, and affect theory for interpretative assistance, it argues that Helen, animals, natural entities, and material things are interconnected in bundles of intra-actions and trans-corporeal entanglements, which make Helen’s embodied, emotional experience vividly perceptible to the audience. Three things are exemplary in this regard: the “lovely virgin streams” (ϰαλλιπάϱθενοι ϱ̔οαί, 1) of the Nile, whose features merge with Helen’s physical and moral qualities; the “egg” (τεῦχος νεοσσῶν λευϰὸν, 256), which materializes her feeling of being a “monstrosity” (τέϱας, 255); and the “statue” (ἄγαλμα, 262), which Helen compares to herself to bewail her beauty. Thus, by reacting to the Leitmotiv of the eidōlon (“phantom”) and highlighting the protean atmosphere of the Egyptian setting, this article aims to show that reading the Helen with a focus on the entanglements of the human and nonhuman allows us to shed new light on the theme of doubling, indeterminacy, and multiplicity which underlies the play.

This article explores Ovid's Heroides 15 (the Epistula Sapphus) through a post-human feminist approach, engaging with the most recent scholarly debate on (Ovid's) Sappho's polysemous poetic language, polyphonic narrative, and gender fluidity. Drawing from recently published works that explore the intersections between posthumanism and antiquity, I show that Her. 15 is resituated within the 'posthuman turn' and accordingly reinterpreted as an expression of Ovid's and Sappho's poetic identity. Sappho's self-identification with her polymorphic poetry, assimilation into the natural world, and transitional sexual identity serve to both downplay and destabilize her role as a poetic subject, while at the same time enhancing her (and Ovid's) poetic creation. The idea of poetry as a self-shaping force is articulated by the agency that certain poetic objects (e.g., the letter, the poem, the verses), as well as other animate or inanimate natural elements (e.g., the branches and birds), hold within the epistle. Ovid has Sappho forego her poetic agency and question her literary skills; however, her poetic identity is also reaffirmed and strengthened precisely by the composition of her epistle. The displacement of the 'human' poet thus serves to enhance the centrality of the artistic, literary work. This dialectic between the limits of Sappho as a poet and the boundlessness of her poetry persists until—and reaches its peak at—the end of Her. 15, where Sappho anticipates her self-murder. Her (foretold) leap in the waters of the Leucadian Sea (217–220) can be interpreted both as a form of self-annihilation and as a means of stressing the permanence and timelessness of her own and Ovid's poetic talents.

This article begins by analyzing the way in which reach and touch mark the achievement of Odysseus’s reunions and suggests a new way of conceptualizing Homeric desire and the protagonist’s need for fulfillment within a narrative through haptic action. It then turns to the ways in which the telos of reach, namely, touch, manifests in a gendered dynamic that pits the masculine grasp against the feminine caress of fingertips. It concludes by outlining the ways in which the very progression of the Homeric narrative, in both the Odyssey and Iliad, is conceptualized in terms of a reaching body.

HELIOS es la Revista Oficial de la Facultad de Educacion y Humanidades de la Universidad Privada Antenor Orrego (UPAO), de Trujillo, Peru. Tiene periodicidad semestral, publica articulos principalmente de la esfera educativa y tambien de campos afines. Recibe textos de la comunidad academica orreguiana y de autores que no pertenecen a ella, peruanos o foraneos.