Homer's Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad

by: Heiden, B.

Price: 59,00 EURO

(in stock)

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an "oral poem," since very near the time of its composition the great epic has circulated as a text stabilized in writing. Thus whether or not it is in some sense "oral poetry," the Iliad undoubtedly has features that render it quite satisfactory to readers and reading. But the question of what these features might be has been difficult for modern Homeric scholarship even to frame, much less address, within the research paradigm of "oral poetics."" "In Homer's Cosmic Fabrication Bruce Heiden delineates a new approach aimed at evaluating what the Iliad furnishes to readers that makes it comprehensible and engaging. His program conceptualizes the act of reading as a flexible repertoire of cognitive functions that a reader might deploy in collaboration with the poem's signs. By positing certain functions hypothetically and applying them to the poem, Heiden's experiments uncover the kind and degree of suitable "reading material" the poem provides.

Introduction: Reading, Choice, and Design
Part I: Dramatic Legibility and Poetic Design
1. Persons, Problems, and Choices: The Progression of Events in the Iliad
2. Event Trajectories in the "Books" of the Iliad
3. The Iliad: An Epic in Three Cycles
4. Paths of Thought: Iliad Cycle I
Part II: Reading Thematic Trajectories
5. Replacements and Representatives: The Quarrel (Cycle I, Column A) and the Embassy (Cycle II, Column A)
6. Zeus's Changing Plans: Cycles I and II, Column Z (Books 8 and 15)
7. Homeric Sublimity: Iliad Book 24
Conclusion: The Fabricated Cosmos and the Poetry of the Future

Series:
American classical studies, 52

Homer's Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad

by: Heiden, B.

• ISBN-13: 9780195341072 / 978-0-19-534107-2
• ISBN-03: 0195341074 / 0-19-534107-4
• Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008

Price: 59,00 EURO

(in stock)