Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation
Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation

Author: Justin Arft

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0192663607

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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.

Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation
Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation

Author: Justin Tyler Arft

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780191943188

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Justin Arft explores how the 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. The queen and her question invite new applications of oral poetics that shed light on the structure, composition, and reperformance of the Odyssey.

Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation
Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation

Author: Justin Arft

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0192847805

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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.

Queen of the Curse
Queen of the Curse

Author: Justin Tyler Arft

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation establishes the compositional authority of Arete, queen of the Phaeacians, in Homer’s Odyssey by means of an oral poetic analysis of the thematic and formulaic structures in the epic. Arete’s fit in the poem has often been viewed as incomplete or awkward; however, by presenting a growing body of evidence concerning her thematic relevance to the Odyssey, in addition to revealing new observations about her formulaic interrogation of Odysseus at Od. 7.238, this study proves that Arete is tied deeply to the central compositional structures of the epic, and her recognition and acceptance of Odysseus as a guest among the Phaeacians is pivotal to his nostos, the primary goal of the epic. Most relevant to Arete’s compositional role is the intratextual resonance of the formulaic interrogation [Greek characters for "tis pothen eis andron . . . , "], a formula that metonymically comes to mean “which Odysseus are you?” and is used to trigger a set of narrative events that lead to critical, nostos-determining moments of performance and recognition in the epic. This study ultimately calls for a new understanding of Homeric formularity and reexamines the metapoetics of memorialization through a close study of Arete and her role in the epic. Although the queen and her people are prophetically tied to Poseidon’s destructive wrath, Arete’s role in forwarding Odysseus’ nostos affords her a place of high honor in the Odyssey’s performance as we now have it.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry
Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry

Author: Andromache Karanika

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-09-11

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0198884583

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Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that became crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This author discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children's songs, hymns, paeans, and ululations, arguing for a combination of ritualized discourse with ludic childhood poetics. With an approach from cognitive and trauma studies, such references can be more revealing of the female experience than previously acknowledged. This book resists the idea that a wedding constitutes an initiation ritual, arguing that what on the surface may seem like a transition to a new phase reveals other underlying trends that work against the concept of a passage. It further considers how emotion is staged and revisits the poetics of return by looking at patterns such as the eloping, returning, failed, and dead bride. Finally, the theme of separation and return as an exemplification of a distinct female nostos is revisited in female-authored poetry, which helps us decode the complex interweaving of wedding performances and lamentation, among other types of performance.

Life / Afterlife
Life / Afterlife

Author: Suzanne Lye

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0197690203

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"Life / Afterlife: Revolution and Reflection in the Ancient Greek Underworld from Homer to Lucian explores the mechanics, function, and impact of ancient Greek Underworld scenes, a unique and ancient form of embedded storytelling appearing across time and genres. This book approaches Underworld scenes as a special register of language that acts as a narrative space outside of chronological time to reflect on important themes and issues in a frame narrative. This book argues that Underworld scenes use hypertextual poetics to embed authorial commentary by creating networks of texts that act as para-narratives, which provide additional information to engage audiences in the interpretative process of a given work. Life / Afterlife traces the development, evolution, and application of Underworld scenes through the works of such authors as Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Plato, Vergil, and Lucian to show how each used afterlife depictions featuring mythic and historical figures as commentaries to communicate a call to action for their audiences in response to cultural, religious, and political changes in their worlds. Using the network of Underworld scenes, authors could reinforce and challenge traditional religious and cultural beliefs and practices by presenting the long-term, cosmic effect of actions in life on an individual's post-death experience. From ancient to modern times, Underworld scenes have helped authors and audiences define the essential qualities of a "good life" for different social, political, and religious groups and their societies"--

Homer and the Poetics of Hades
Homer and the Poetics of Hades

Author: George Alexander Gazis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 019878726X

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This unique approach to the Iliad and the Odyssey explores the role and function of Hades as a poetic environment in which traditional exposition of heroic values may be subverted in favour of a more personally inflected approach to the epic past, giving rise to a different kind of poetics: the 'poetics of Hades'.

Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus
Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus

Author: Christopher Athanasious Faraone

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0197552994

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In Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus, Christopher Faraone discusses a number of short hexametrical genres such as oracles, incantations and laments that do not easily fit the generic models provided by the extant poetry of Hesiod and Homer. In the process, he gives us new insight into their ritual performance, their early history, and how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own hexametrical poems--by playing with and sometimes overturning the generic expectations of their audiences or readers. Christopher Faraone combines literary and ritual studies to produce a rich and detailed picture of hexametrical genres performed publicly for gods, such as hymns or laments for Adonis, or other that were performed more privately, such as epithalamia, oracles, or incantations. This volume deals primarily with the recovery of lost or under-appreciated hexametrical genres, which are often left out of modern taxonomies of archaic hexametrical poetry, either because they survive only in fragments or because the earliest evidence for them dates to the classical period.

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics
Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics

Author: Jonathan L. Ready

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 019257194X

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Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE, but what about Homeric texts prior to the emergence of standardized written texts? Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics sheds light on that earlier history by drawing on scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies to query from three different angles what it means to speak of Homeric poetry together with the word "text". Part I utilizes work in linguistic anthropology on oral texts and oral intertextuality to illuminate both the verbal and oratorical landscapes our Homeric poets fashion in their epics and what the poets were striving to do when they performed. Looking to folkloristics, part II examines modern instances of the textualization of an oral traditional work in order to reconstruct the creation of written versions of the Homeric poems through a process that began with a poet dictating to a scribe. Combining research into scribal activity in other cultures, especially in the fields of religious studies and medieval studies, with research into performance in the field of linguistic anthropology, part III investigates some of the earliest extant texts of the Homeric epics, the so-called wild papyri. By looking at oral texts, dictated texts, and wild texts, this volume traces the intricate history of Homeric texts from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period, long before the emergence of standardized written texts, in a comparative and interdisciplinary study that will benefit researchers in a number of disciplines across the humanities.