Clearly Liam just confused The Odyssey for Ulysses, and assumed Ulysses was about Ulysses S. Grant, easy mistake
I'm from the UK, which definitely did not try its hardest to make the world revolve around it.
To be fair UK history is also many nation's history, including the US.
Honestly people should be shamed for not knowing about Abe's Odyssey
I find it a bit weird you haven't at least heard of the Odyssey by cultural osmosis. I've never technically read it but I like know the basic points of the story.
pretty much anyone who's ESL would not hear it through osmosis
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Greek history and mythology is taught throughout the world.
and I've met Chinese and Indians who don't
I've also met Chinese people who can speak Tamil
I mean I know it's not literally taught EVERYWHERE, just that it some exposure in some non-western cultures.
I'm trying to think of how many whites know what the I Ching or the Upanishads are, and it's not many, and it's probably about that number, maybe a bit higher
If you said "non-westerners" to mean countries which don't think of themselves as rooted is Greek and then Roman cultural history, then yeah I suppose. But any European country I would expect people to have learned it through osmosis.
im curious to know if you think of a country like Brazil as western. Its interesting to see how the perception of "western"-ess varies.
I was creating a definition for this case, really. 'Western" generally is a relation to non-western, defining it malleably to suit imperialist needs. Sometimes Brazil is western (not Muslim, for example, in the war on the middle eastern Arab countries), but others it's not.
In this case, I was saying that functionally, the important aspect for whether someone would absord stuff about the Odyssey has more to do with whether their country sees itself as a descendent of Greek and Roman culture. The west seems to think it's the true followers (enlightenment and such) and so focusses more on it. Why would Chinese people care when the base of their culture was already also in existence with writing that also exists to read now?
I have a feeling Liam's teachers tried a lot harder than everyone who has ever talked to Liam assumes.
