Homer's Winged Words

Homer's Winged Words
Author: Steve Reece
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004174419

For over 2500 years many of the most learned scholars of the Greek language have concerned themselves with the topic of etymology. The most productive source of difficult, even inexplicable, words was Homer s 28,000 verses of epic poetry. Steve Reece proposes an approach to elucidating the meanings of some of these difficult words that finds its inspiration primarily in Milman Parry s oral-formulaic theory. He proposes that during the long period of oral transmission acoustic uncertainties, especially regarding word boundaries, were continually occurring: a bard uttered one collocation of words, but his audience thought it heard another. The consequent resegmentation of words and phrases is the probable cause of some of the etymologically inexplicable words in our Homeric texts.

Memorial

Memorial
Author: Alice Oswald
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Battle casualties
ISBN: 9780571274185

The most remarkable and affecting book of poetry I encountered this year. James Wood, The New Yorker

Birds in the Ancient World

Birds in the Ancient World
Author: Jeremy Mynott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2018
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0198713657

Birds played an important role in the ancient world: as indicators of time, weather, and seasons; as a resource for hunting, medicine, and farming; as pets and entertainment; as omens and messengers of the gods. Jeremy Mynott explores the similarities and surprising differences between ancient perceptions of the natural world and our own.

Winged Words

Winged Words
Author: Piero Boitani
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2010-10-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1459605640

Flight has always fascinated human minds, but until a century ago it remained a dream - the exclusive domain of birds, gods, and mythological heroes. From the myths of the ancients to the poetry of Pindar and Yeats, Winged Words traces the imprint of the human impulse to fly from premodern times to the age of terrorism in both literature and his...

Hearing Homer's Song

Hearing Homer's Song
Author: Robert Kanigel
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0525520945

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature. In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before," when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, the way we think of most literature; and the "after" that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three. From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of "oral theory," which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.

Odyssey

Odyssey
Author: Homer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780198788805

Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.

Metaphor in Homer

Metaphor in Homer
Author: Andreas T. Zanker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2019-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 110849188X

How did the Homeric narrator use metaphors of time, speech, and thought to compose and structure the Iliad and Odyssey?