| Course Description |
A reading of Homer’s Odyssey with a focus on seminal episodes having to do with the
construction of the plot, and the intricate relationship between the Homeric narrator, his
characters, and internal and external audiences.
The Odyssey famously contains comparisons of its polytropos character (var.
reading polykrotos) to a poet, both explicitly (11.363ff.) and implicitly (19.203 with Hesiod,
Theogony 26-9). We will consider how the quality of being polytropos (including a tendency
towards ambiguity and indirection) factors into the ethics of narration in the poem, at every level
of the narrative. We will also consider the ethics of narration in the poem in relation to its
importance in the subsequent Greek rhetorical tradition. Archaic poetry, and the Homeric
poems, often suffer from the implicit bias associated with being the earliest extant Greek
literature, leading to the view that their content is naïve when compared against the literary
developments of the fifth century and the Hellenistic period. This seminar will approach
the Odyssey as a foundational text for Greek rhetorical culture, with particular attention to what it
offered the rhetorical culture of classical Athens.
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