Binding: Hardcover
Description: The gods of Homer's Iliad have troubled readers for millennia with many features of their presentation seeming to defy satisfactory explanation. Homer's Divine Audience presents and explores a new 'metaperformative approach to scenes of divine viewing counsel and intervention in the Iliad referencing the oral nature of the poem's original composition and transmission to cast the Olympian gods in part as an internal audience who follow the action from their privileged divine perspective much like the poet's own listeners. Although critics have already often described the gods activities in terms of attendance at a 'show and have suggested analogies to theatre and sports little has yet been done to investigate the particular strategies by which the poet conveys the impression of gods attending a live staged event. This volume's analysis of those strategies points to a 'metaperformative significance to the motif of divine viewing: the poet is using the gods in part to model and thereby manipulate the ongoing dynamics of performance and live reception. The gods like the external audience are capable of a variety of emotional responses to events at Troy; notably pleasure and pity but also great aloofness. By performing the speeches of the provocative infuriating yet ultimately obliging Zeus the poet at key moments both challenges his listeners to take a stake in the continuation of the performance and presents a sophisticated critique of possible responses to his poem.
Title: Homer's Divine Audience The Iliad's Reception On Mount Olympus
Author(s): Myers Tobias (Assistant Professor Of Classics Assistant Professor Of Classics Connecticut College)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780198842354
Pages: 246 Pages, 2 Black-And-White Illustrations
Publication Date: 8/27/2019
Category: Literary Studies: Poetry & Poets