1	Comparing: Neither Here nor There? November 19, 2002
2	What comparison is good for “One day, when I was playing with a group of children, a little girl who had been struck by one of her playmates took refuge by my side and, with a very mysterious air, began to whisper something in my ear… [She] had come to tell me the name of her enemy” (TT, 279) “[I,] Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye…” – “Grant that Odysseus, raider of cities, never sees his home!” (O, 160-161)
3	What do we get out of this? A sign of historical influence? A universal truth of human behavior? Just a coincidence? How about: A hypothesis that allows us to take another step, by using one text to reveal the properties of another, one context to point up the specificities of another context. Comparisons catalyze
4	Parallels Comparison is not about discovering parallels (as if they were pre-existent); it’s about fashioning them Set up a hypothesis and see where it leads Not “is it true?” but “where does it point?”
5	Diamond cuts diamond Last time we tacitly took the Sims as the model for the reading of the other texts; hypothesis, “all texts can be envisioned as varieties of simulation” Today, perhaps take the Odyssey as model. What does that model reveal about the texts it confronts?
6	Displacement and Homecoming Odysseus’s circular journey: triumph, comedy, confirmation The name comes to rest on the self Crisis moments in the relation of name and self are all overcome in the course of the epic Storytelling about Odysseus Odysseus’s address to his heart (O 375)
7	Displacements in PB Pilgrimages (and visits in general) How letters and poems “get out,” run loose Exile (definitive) “Someone glimpsed her going out into the fields to dry some sort of greens and muttering to herself: ‘It’s the figures wearing those court robes I cannot forget.’” (Mumyōzōshi)
8	Displacements in R2 Bullingbrook’s exile and return Richard’s return from Ireland The deposition scene as a “departure” One-way journeys versus return tickets The nature of tragedy
9	Claude on the move The “ballet” of Bororo moieties: “a guarantee that life is eternal, the world full of help and society just” (TT 245) “Turning their whole social and spiritual life into a coat of arms in which symmetry and asymmetry are equally balanced, like the subtle patterns with which a Caduveo scars her face” (ibid.; see 195-197, the irreconcilable interplay of reciprocity and hierarchy among the Caduveo)
10	But… “men die and do not come back; and every social order has a similarity with death in that it takes something away and gives nothing in return” (TT 245) Interplay between cyclical time and one-way time: travel, change, ecological degradation, communication, entropy An ironic (lying) Odyssey? (“I came back. No, it’s not me.”)
11	I am my house Difficulty of working this parallel into Sims: not really a narrative genre? Travel for homebodies? Sims online? Downloaded skins: a digital, not material, identity?