For centuries, writers and novelists largely avoided putting themselves in their own stories and fictions. Shakespeare doesn't appear as a character in his plays. Nor does he write a play about his own life. The same is true for Austen, Hardy, Tolstoy or Hemingway. But today the fashion has reversed. Personal accounts, direct experience, are not only allowed but almost required by publishers and it would seem the public alike. Those that turn the lens inward to the self are gaining the applause of critics and culture and have become the winners of current writing style. But critics argue that the fashion for the personal is a mistake and reflects a shift toward an empty subjective relativism — there is no overall story, only 'my story'. And in doing so we are losing the universal stories and social patterns that have long anchored humanity.

Should we accept culture's obsession with the self as a true mirror onto lived reality? Or is it a narcissistic distortion that risks ending up with no shared reality at all?

The first female Odyssey translator, joining us from Pennsylvania, Emily Wilson, MacArthur-winning philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, and literary provocateur Patricia Lockwood debate ego and epics.