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Listening to Homer - Tradition, Narrative, and Audience (Paperback)
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Listening to Homer - Tradition, Narrative, and Audience (Paperback)
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The Homeric poems were not intended for readers, but for a
listening audience. Traditional in their basic elements, the
stories were learned by oral poets from earlier poets and recreated
at every performance. Individual nuances, tailored to the audience,
could creep into the stories of the Greek heroes on each and every
occasion when a bard recited the epics.
For a particular audience at a particular moment, "tradition" is
what it believes it has inherited from the past--and it may not be
particularly old. The boundaries between the traditional and the
innovative may become blurry and indistinct. By rethinking
tradition, we can see Homer's methods and concerns in a new light.
The Homeric poet is not naive. He must convince his audience that
the story is true. He must therefore seem disinterested,
unconcerned with promoting anyone's interests. The poet speaks as
if everything he says is merely the repetition of old tales. Yet he
carefully ensures that even someone who knows only a minimal amount
about the ancient heroes can follow and enjoy the performance,
while someone who knows many stories will not remember
inappropriate ones. Pretending that every detail is already
familiar, the poet heightens suspense and implies that ordinary
people are the real judges of great heroes.
"Listening to Homer" transcends present controversies about Homeric
tradition and invention by rethinking how tradition functions.
Focusing on reception rather than on composition, Ruth Scodel
argues that an audience would only rarely succeed in identifying
narrative innovation. Homeric narrative relies on a
traditionalizing, inclusive rhetoric that denies the innovation of
the oral performance while providing enough information to make the
epics intelligible to audiences for whom much of the material is
new. "Listening to Homer" will be of interest to general
classicists, as well as to those specializing in Greek epic and
narrative performance. Its wide breadth and scope will also appeal
to those non-classicists interested in the nature of oral
performance.
Ruth Scodel is Professor of Greek and Latin, University of
Michigan, and former president of the American Philological
Association. "Ruth Scodel's Listening to Homer proves it is still
possible to explore the workings of epic without recourse to a
battery of jargon or technicalities. This is not a 'one big idea'
book but a rich . . . set of reflections; it makes refreshing
reading . . . ."
---Greece & Rome "This is an important book, putting the
receiving rather than the sending side of the performance of the
Homeric epics center stage. The many observations on narrative
technique are often new and worthwhile."
---Irene J.F. de Jong, Gnomon
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