Download or read book Singers Heroes and Gods in the Odyssey written by Charles Segal and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the special charms of the Odyssey, according to Charles Segal, is the way it transports readers to fascinating places. Yet despite the appeal of its narrative, the Odyssey is fully understood only when its style, design, and mythical patterns are taken into account as well. Bringing a new richness to interpretation of this epic, Segal looks closely at key forms of social and personal organization which Odysseus encounters in his voyages. Segal also considers such topics as the relationship between bard and audience, the implications of the Odyssey's self-consciousness about its own poetics, and Homer's treatment of the nature of poetry.
Download or read book Performing Homer The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera written by Wendy Heller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the listener. Indeed, it is precisely the theatrical quality of the poems that would inspire later interpreters to cast the Odyssey and the Iliad in a host of other media-novels, plays, poems, paintings, and even that most elaborate of all art forms, opera, exemplified by no less a work than Monteverdi's Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. In Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, scholars in classics, drama, Italian literature, art history, and musicology explore the journey of Homer's Odyssey from ancient to modern times. The book traces the reception of the Odyssey though the Italian humanist sources—from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto—to the treatment of the tale not only by Monteverdi but also such composers as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Gluck, and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the dramatic and poetic traditions thereafter by such modern writers as Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood.
Download or read book The Odyssey written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the characters, plot and writing of the Odyssey by Homer. Includes critical essays on the poem and a brief biography of the author.
Download or read book Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras written by John Marincola and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in The Edinburgh Leventis Studies series collects the papers presented at the sixth A. G. Leventis conference, It engages with new research and new approaches to the Greek past, and brings the fruits of that research to a wider audience.
Download or read book The Odyssey written by Homer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who was driven far and wide after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy' Twenty years after setting out to fight in the Trojan War, Odysseus is yet to return home to Ithaca. His household is in disarray: a horde of over 100 disorderly and arrogant suitors are vying to claim Odysseus' wife Penelope, and his young son Telemachus is powerless to stop them. Meanwhile, Odysseus is driven beyond the limits of the known world, encountering countless divine and earthly challenges. But Odysseus is 'of many wiles' and his cunning and bravery eventually lead him home, to reclaim both his family and his kingdom. The Odyssey rivals the Iliad as the greatest poem of Western culture and is perhaps the most influential text of classical literature. This elegant and compelling new translation is accompanied by a full introduction and notes that guide the reader in understanding the poem and the many different contexts in which it was performed and read.
Download or read book Odysseus Hero of Practical Intelligence written by Jeffrey Barnouw and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2004 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In dramatic representations and narrative reports of inner deliberation the Odyssey displays the workings of the human mind and its hero's practical intelligence, epitomized by anticipating consequences and controlling his actions accordingly. Once his hope of returning home as husband, father and king is renewed on Calypso's isle, Odysseus shows a consistent will to focus on this purpose and subordinate other impulses to it. His fabled cleverness is now fully engaged in a gradually emerging plan, as he thinks back from that final goal through a network of means to achieve it. He relies on "signs"--inferences in the form "if this, then that" as defined by the Stoic Chrysippus--and the nature of his intelligence is thematically underscored through contrast with others' recklessness, that is, failure to heed signs or reckon consequences. In Homeric deliberation, the mind is torn between competing options or intentions, not between "reason" and "desire." The lack of distinct opposing faculties and hierarchical organization in the Homeric mind, far from archaic simplicity, prefigures the psychology of Chrysippus, who cites deliberation scenes from the Odyssey against Plato's hierarchical tri-partite model. From the Stoics, there follows a psychological tradition leading through Hobbes and Leibniz, to Peirce and Dewey. These thinkers are drawn upon to show the significance of the conception of "thinking" first articulated in the Odyssey. Homer's work inaugurates an approach that has provoked philosophical conflict persisting into the present, and opposition to pragmatism and Pragmatism can be discerned in prominent critiques of Homer and his hero which are analyzed and countered in this study.
Download or read book Understanding The Odyssey written by Claudia Durst Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-06-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For thousands of years, The Odyssey has resonated throughout the Western world. Homer has been an original source of inspiration to writers, painters, sculptors, and filmmakers, as well as a vital source of information about the mythology, history, and culture of ancient Greece. This casebook uniquely blends commentary and primary documents, situating the epic within historical contexts that are important for students to understand. The literary analysis chapter is ideal for readers coming to The Odyssey for the first time, introducing the work with a chronology of events and identification of major characters and themes. Topical chapters carefully consider matters of mythology, geography, archeology, and class issues pertinent to The Odyssey. Excerpts from classical and scholarly sources, including Herodotus, Plato, Thucydides, and Bulfinch, help students understand the historical framework, and materials from government documents and newspaper accounts help students make connections betweenThe Odyssey's thematic ideas and current events, such as the September 11th attacks and the ongoing conflict in Ireland.
Download or read book Odysseus in America written by Jonathan Shay and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious follow-up to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road back to civilian life. Seamlessly combining important psychological work and brilliant literary interpretation with an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions, Shay deepens our understanding of both the combat veteran's experience and one of the world's greatest classics.
Download or read book The Shamanic Odyssey written by Robert Tindall and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the striking parallels between indigenous cultures of the Americas and the ancient Homeric world as well as Tolkien’s Middle Earth • Explores the shamanic use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey and the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien • Examines Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism • Reveals how the Odyssey emerged precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. The native way of viewing the world--that is, understanding our cosmos as living, sentient, and interconnected--can be found hidden throughout Western literature, beginning with the very origin of the European literary tradition: Homer’s Odyssey. Weaving together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine healers in North and South America, the authors explore the use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Tolkien’s final novella, Smith of Wootton Major. The authors examine Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism. They show the deep affinities between the healing powers of ancient bardic song and the icaros of the shamans of the Amazon rain forest, how Odysseus’s battle with Circe--wielder of narcotic plants and Mistress of Animals--follows the traditional method of negotiating with a plant ally, and how Odysseus’s journey to the land of the dead signifies the universal practice of the vision quest, a key part of shamanic initiation. Emerging precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness, Homer’s work represents a window into the lost native mind of the Western world. In this way, the Odyssey as well as Tolkien’s work can be seen as an awakening and healing song to return us to our native minds and bring our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.
Download or read book Oral Performance and Its Context written by Chris Mackie and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is concerned with aspects of orality and literacy in the ancient world. It arises from the tremendous contemporary interest among scholars in questions of how literacy and orality co-exist and interact in the ancient world. The contents of the book are refereed papers originally presented at the fifth biennial 'Orality and Literacy in ancient Greece' held at The University of Melbourne in 2002. Papers are offered by scholars from Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia which deal with a range of periods and genres in antiquity, from Homer through to Roman literature. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the ancient world.
Download or read book Philosophy and Salvation in Greek Religion written by Vishwa Adluri and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Vlastos’ “Theology and Philosophy in Early Greek Thought,” scholars have known that a consideration of ancient philosophy without attention to its theological, cosmological and soteriological dimensions remains onesided. Yet, philosophers continue to discuss thinkers such as Parmenides and Plato without knowledge of their debt to the archaic religious traditions. Perhaps our own religious prejudices allow us to see only a “polis religion” in Greek religion, while our modern philosophical openness and emphasis on reason induce us to rehabilitate ancient philosophy by what we consider the highest standard of knowledge: proper argumentation. Yet, it is possible to see ancient philosophy as operating according to a different system of meaning, a different “logic.” Such a different sense of logic operates in myth and other narratives, where the argument is neither completely illogical nor rational in the positivist sense. The articles in this volume undertake a critical engagement with this unspoken legacy of Greek religion. The aim of the volume as a whole is to show how, beyond the formalities and fallacies of arguments, something more profound is at stake in ancient philosophy: the salvation of the philosopher-initiate.
Download or read book Singing the Past written by Karl Reichl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oral epic poetry is still performed by Turkic singers in Central Asia. On trips to the region, Karl Reichl collected heroic poems from the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Karakalpak oral traditions. Through a close analysis of these Turkic works, he shows that they are typologically similar to heroic poetry in Old English, Old High German, and Old French and that they can offer scholars new insights into the oral background of these medieval texts.Reichl draws on his research in Central Asia to discuss questions regarding performance as well as the singers' training, role in society, and repertoire. He asserts that heroic poetry and epic are primarily concerned with the interpretation of the past in song: the courageous deeds of ancestors, the search for tribal and societal roots, and the definition and transmission of cultural values. Reichl finds that in these traditions the heroic epic is part of a generic system that includes historical and eulogistic poetry as well as heroic lays, a view that has diachronic implications for medieval poetry.Singing the Past reminds readers that because much medieval poetry was composed for oral recitation, both the Turkic and the medieval heroic poems must always be appreciated as poetry in performance, as sound listened to, as words spoken or sung.
Download or read book Arete and the Odyssey s Poetics of Interrogation written by Justin Arft and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation explores how the enigmatic Phaeacian queen, Arete, is at the heart of an epic-scale "poetics of interrogation" used throughout the Odyssey to negotiate Odysseus' kleos, or epic renown. Arete's interrogation of Odysseus has been especially problematic in scholarship, but diachronic and synchronic analysis of similar interrogations across Indo-European, Orphic, and Greek epigrammatic corpora show that the "stranger's interrogation" is a formula that demands performance and negotiation of status. Within the Odyssey, this interrogation is part of an intraformular network used to generate kleos, and the queen's question initiates the longest and most complex negotiation of Odysseus' status in epic and memory. Arete's role as interrogator not only explains her strange authority and resonance with both Penelope and comparative afterlife figures, but it also establishes a gendered, agonistic tension between she and her husband, Alkinoos, that influences the structure, genre, and narratology of performances across the Phaeacian episode. This book reinterprets the Odyssey's central episode and challenges several assumptions about Nausikaa and Alkinoos' famed hospitality, even demonstrating how the Apologue is organized as a response to competing inquiries into Odysseus' fundamental status in tradition. The Odyssey ultimately navigates away from Odysseus' public reputation and roots his status in private memories, and Arete's carefully arranged interventions signal the larger process by which the Odyssey immortalizes Odysseus in poetry as a nostos hero. The queen and her question invite new applications of oral poetics that shed light on the structure, composition, and reperformance of the Odyssey.
Download or read book The Suitors in the Odyssey written by Martin Steinrück and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The suitors in the Odyssey strikingly resemble a very specific audience of iambic poets such as Archilochus or Semonides. Justifying these young men's deaths, the Odyssey engages in a polemic intertext with Archilochus' attacks against the threatening epic discourse. This study is concerned with reading both the traces of this often hidden quarrel in the Odyssey and the answers we can find within the iambic texts. Although iambus and epos have been connected in earlier studies, the direct portrait of the iambic audience within the Odyssey has not been examined. This book allows the reader to see these issues in the larger social context.
Download or read book Homer s The Odyssey written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second of the two great epic poems attributed to Homer, The Odyssey takes place after the Trojan War and tells the story of Odysseus's voyage home to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. Odysseus's journey is a perilous one, filled with precarious adventures and strange mythical creatures. Supported by numerous full-length essays, this updated volume offers various critical approaches to exploring this powerful tale of magic and heroism.
Download or read book Reading the Odyssey written by Seth L. Schein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging collection makes available to specialists and nonspecialists alike important critical work on the Odyssey produced during the last half century. The ten essays address five major concerns: the poem's programmatic representation of social and religious institutions and values; its transformation of folktales and traditional stories into epic adventures; its representation of gender roles and, in particular, of Penelope; its narrative strategies and form; and its relation to the Iliad, especially to that epic's distinctive conception of heroism. In the introduction, Seth L. Schein describes the poetic background to the work and suggests a variety of interpretive approaches, some of which are developed in the essays that follow. These essays include previously published work by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Pietro Pucci, and Charles P. Segal. There also are a new essay by Laura M. Slatkin, two revised and expanded ones by Nancy Felson-Rubin and Michael N. Nagler, and three appearing in English for the first time by Uvo Hlscher, Karl Reinhardt, and Vernant. The result is a collection that juxtaposes older, often hard-to-find articles with significant newer pieces in a way that allows for a fruitful dialogue among them.
Download or read book Interpreting Greek Tragedy written by Charles Segal and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This generous selection of published essays by the distinguished classicist Charles Segal represents over twenty years of critical inquiry into the questions of what Greek tragedy is and what it means for modern-day readers. Taken together, the essays reflect profound changes in the study of Greek tragedy in the United States during this period-in particular, the increasing emphasis on myth, psychoanalytic interpretation, structuralism, and semiotics.
