Textual Events
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (GB) |
| ISBN-13 | 9780198805823 |
| Open Library | OL22535706W |
| Total publications | 6 |
| Coverage period | 2018 - 2018 |
| Language | EN |
| Cited by | 5 |
| h-index | 1 |
Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Several chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings. Others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. In addition to studies that analyse individual lyric texts and lyric authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar), the volume includes treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns . Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events re-examines the relationship between the poems’ formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of sociopolitical discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as enacting cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh
Event and Artefact
This chapter examines the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as a case study in order to explore early Greek ideas of authorship, occasionality, literary permanence, and reception. The comparanda deployed come from archaic lyric and especially from Pindar’s epinicians. The first section claims that the speaker identifies himself as Homer and discusses some implications for how audiences conceptualize the hymn. The second section describes how the hymn antici…
Sailing and Singing
This chapter suggests that it is time to take a new look at Alcaeus’ so-called ‘ship of state’ poems. Although few scholars now question that these poems should be read allegorically, this consensus is a relatively recent phenomenon, due, it is contended, to a desire to situate the poems in a historical performance context (whether political or otherwise) that is now lost to us. The interpretative emphasis on conditions of performance context obs…
Hermetically Unsealed
The Hymn to Hermes offers a late archaic or early classical viewpoint on genre in lyric poetry. It compares hymns and theogonies to bantering songs at symposia, apparently in a paradox grounded in Hermes’ ability to control transfers across firm boundaries. However, the comparisons have a latent logic: the Hymn to Hermes is itself bantering intertextually with the Homeric Hymn to Apollo ; it alludes to the fact that a komos can involve both prais…
Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric
This chapter offers an analysis of the ways in which the language of Sappho’s poems makes use of pragmatic elements that evoke a link to an extratextual world. Through this analysis, the dominant interpretative paradigm is questioned that sees Sappho’s poetry as primarily embedded within a ritual performance context, as well as the alternative reading that explains some of its most salient features as due to strategies enabled by the adoption of …
Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener
This chapter investigates the notion of lyric listening and concentrates on the particular role of the adverb δηὖτε (‘once again’) in constructing a poetics of delayed repetition in several archaic melic poets (Alcman, Sappho, and Anacreon). Building on the model provided by a reading of the mythical nymph Echo in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe to understand the seduction and role of delay and repetition in lyric listening, it is argued that ‘once aga…
Textual Events
Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative metho…
Textual Events
Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative metho…
Event and Artefact
This chapter examines the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as a case study in order to explore early Greek ideas of authorship, occasionality, literary permanence, and reception. The comparanda deployed come from archaic lyric and especially from Pindar’s epinicians. The first section claims that the speaker identifies himself as Homer and discusses some implications for how audiences conceptualize the hymn. The second section describes how the hymn antici…
Sailing and Singing
This chapter suggests that it is time to take a new look at Alcaeus’ so-called ‘ship of state’ poems. Although few scholars now question that these poems should be read allegorically, this consensus is a relatively recent phenomenon, due, it is contended, to a desire to situate the poems in a historical performance context (whether political or otherwise) that is now lost to us. The interpretative emphasis on conditions of performance context obs…
Hermetically Unsealed
The Hymn to Hermes offers a late archaic or early classical viewpoint on genre in lyric poetry. It compares hymns and theogonies to bantering songs at symposia, apparently in a paradox grounded in Hermes’ ability to control transfers across firm boundaries. However, the comparisons have a latent logic: the Hymn to Hermes is itself bantering intertextually with the Homeric Hymn to Apollo ; it alludes to the fact that a komos can involve both prais…
Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric
This chapter offers an analysis of the ways in which the language of Sappho’s poems makes use of pragmatic elements that evoke a link to an extratextual world. Through this analysis, the dominant interpretative paradigm is questioned that sees Sappho’s poetry as primarily embedded within a ritual performance context, as well as the alternative reading that explains some of its most salient features as due to strategies enabled by the adoption of …
Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener
This chapter investigates the notion of lyric listening and concentrates on the particular role of the adverb δηὖτε (‘once again’) in constructing a poetics of delayed repetition in several archaic melic poets (Alcman, Sappho, and Anacreon). Building on the model provided by a reading of the mythical nymph Echo in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe to understand the seduction and role of delay and repetition in lyric listening, it is argued that ‘once aga…
Textual Events
Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative metho…