Looking into Walcott's Homer
Omeros between epic and mock-epic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2174303 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Leo Dunsker (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 532-552 |
| Publication date | 2024-05-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369801x.2023.2290562 |
| OpenAlex | W4389924493 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
This essay’s contribution to an already voluminous body of criticism on Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) consists in its attention to questions of specifically poetic genre, by which it opens a space in postcolonial studies for the consideration not just of literary forms beyond the novel – the larger aim of this special issue – but also of poetic forms beyond the lyric. Previous critical accounts have discussed the poem’s allusions to Homer at length. This essay builds upon these accounts by arguing for a mock-epic interpretation of these epic signifiers, which by the analogies they establish between Homer’s and the poet’s respective milieux allegorize the postcolonial poet’s alienation from his cultural milieu. This mock-epic inversion turns on the figure of Homer, or more specifically on the ways in which Omeros negotiates the many contradictions his figure entails within a Western cultural framework. The poet’s capacity for Homeric analogies distinguishes him from his subjects, whose frame of reference apparently excludes Homer. But if Homeric epic’s cultural logic is not reproduced by Omeros itself, it is represented in that poem by images of Afro-Caribbean folk-cultural practice which resist Homeric analogy. If these images are “epic”, it is because they center the cultural practice of the St. Lucian people themselves, without reference to the poet’s external position
Art · EPIC · Literature · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |