The Odyssey x Canonicity

We're back from our Summer Break™ with an episode about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. It's not easy to tackle the zeitgeistiness of a poem that's been circulating for thousands of years, but leave it up to Hannah and Marcelle to try anyway. In this episode, we chat about the creation of Homeric epics, authorship, the cultural force of the so-called Western Canon, and the fluidity of The Odyssey as a culture text in and of itself.

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To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode!

Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.

*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both.

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Works Cited

Bostick, Dani. “The Classical Roots of White Supremacy.” Learning for Justice. Southern Poverty Law Centre, 4 January 2021. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/the-classical-roots-of-white-supremacy/.

Hall, Edith. The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. London: I.B.Tauris, 2008.

Kellman, Steven G. “The Literary Canon.” EBSCO Research Starters. 2023. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/literary-canon.

Mahdawi, Arwa. “Why is Elon Musk so threatened by the casting of The Odyssey?” The Guardian 22 May 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/22/elon-musk-the-odyssey-casting.

Mcleod, E.M. [@mcleodmouth]. “LUPITA GET BEHIND ME .” Instagram, 3 May 2026. https://www.instagram.com/p/DX4pI19pP0a/?hl=en.

Wilson, Emily, trans. The Odyssey. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

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