Olga Tokarczuk’s (Female) Odysseys

ABSTRACT: Seen by many as the Ur-story of travel and return to the home in western literature, the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus has inspired hundreds of retellings in different genres and languages across the globe, but they all encode the traveler as a male adventurer who crosses boundaries and penetrates spaces. In contrast, my essay takes a close look at a female literary re-accentuation of the original myth by the 2018 Nobel Prize winner, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, in order to investigate the significant disparities between male and female adventure stories and explore how female re-conceptualizations of the Odyssey unsettle the traditional symbolic order through writing that is both pluralistic, multi-voiced, and universal, all-inclusive. Ultimately, I argue that Tokarczuk’s creative refashioning of one of the foundational myths of western civilization in her novel Flights , constitutes a fresh feminist critique of modern subjectivity and a bold proclamation of the need to embrace a new type of a model traveler: the “feminist nomad,” who is much better suited to the “becoming-world” of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism.