User:Akhilleus/HomerOutline

User:Petrouchka wrote this awhile back, but took it off his/her user page. I think it's a useful template for my long-planned revision of the Homer page, so I'm stealing it.

Suggestion for revised structure of Homer article

I've posted this here as a provisional template (pending discussion) for re-writing the article on Homer. Some of this is in the form of reminders to myself, rather than to visitors; so, my apologies if it's unclear.

The guiding principles are: information goes first, interesting stuff goes second, hardcore stuff goes at the end.

Opening section


 * what he's important for (i.e. = author of Iliad/Odyssey)
 * lack of historical knowledge about the individual; who 'Homer' was is a highly academic (and sometimes polemical) topic of discussion, and is closely tied up with scholarly traditions surrounding Homer (see 'Homeric scholarship' below)
 * approx. date(s) -- giving very carefully exactly what the date is supposed to represent (e.g. when the menis narrative of the Iliad first appeared, or when Homer lived, or when the Iliad reached its "final" form -- with a very careful definition of "final" --, or when the poems were first written down). Tied to language/dialect (see below)

Works

 * surviving: Iliad, Odyssey
 * v. short summaries of the above
 * Margites

Spurious works

 * Hymns, Thebaid(? check this), Batr., rest of Epic Cycle(s), "epigrams" (in Certamen)

Ancient traditions about Homer the individual

 * sources: based on Lives, etc
 * blindness
 * city of origin
 * as noted in opening section, current thinking about "Homer the individual" is inextricably tied up with scholarship; and who/what you think Homer was is closely tied to what school of thought you tend to go along with

Stylistic features

 * focus on characteristics alien to a modern audience: formulaic style, epithets, similes, digressions, type-scenes
 * on formulae, see also "metre" below

Genre

 * genre: "deeds of men", kleos (to take the Nagyist line)
 * action, movement, directness; absence of authorial voice; characters' psychology conveyed through words and action, rather than by a god's-eye view into their heads
 * ancient contrast with Hesiod: ref. Certamen; but overstated ("Hesiodic" works have many "Homeric" characteristics and vice versa)
 * Iliad starkly contrasts glory of war vs. horrors of war
 * both epics display concern with what it means to be a heroic figure, a great person (the word "hero" is never used in Homer) and the relationship between that person and the community
 * sense of unbridgeable gap between past and present

Performance

 * oral performance vs. oral tradition

Dialect

 * dig up some stuff on this

Metre and formulaic style

 * link to dactylic hexameter
 * foundation of "Parryist" scholarship (see below): metrical formulae
 * West vs. Nagy on development of the hexameter
 * Nagy on metrical parallels in Vedic poetry; his comparison with Sappho 44 is more interesting
 * external link (to put at bottom): aoidoi.org

Nachleben

 * Homeric material in modern literature/media
 * poetry/books/film/TV
 * Homer himself: myths
 * Dictys of Crete
 * books/etc that have show an individual who becomes "Homer"; was there not a scifi book recently that had a warrior from the Trojan War become Homer?; Borges' story "The immortal"; someone else can fill out the list

Ancient scholarship

 * sources: scholia and other odds'n'ends
 * Aristarchos' and Zenodotos' editions of the text
 * the "separators" (Xenon & co.)
 * focus on inconsistencies and improprieties (ou prepon)
 * allegorical interpretation (Herakleitos, some scholia, Porphyry)
 * Further reading
 * Pfeiffer
 * Scribes and Scholars

18th and 19th centuries

 * characterised by obsession with the "Homeric question": answering Wolf's question "what does it mean to restore the poems to their original, pristine form?"
 * Wolf
 * Analysis vs. Unitarianism
 * other major figures: Lachmann, Wilamowitz, etc

20th century

 * continuation of anal./unit. in various quarters (Bassett, Page, Merkelbach, Heubeck's and Dawe's editions of the Odyssey)
 * examples of peculiarities of expression in 20th-cent. scholars that only make sense in context of this opposition (get that ref. from Allen; anything in West's recent articles?)
 * Parry and Lord:
 * study of oral tradition; relationship between "our" Homer and the oral traditional Homer; often called "oral theory"
 * major figures (Notopoulos, Fenik, Nagler, Nagy, Bakker)
 * Neoanalysis:
 * study of relationship between Homer and Cyclic material
 * major figures (Kakridis, Kullmann, Latacz - get more names)
 * other recent developments
 * narratology -- de Jong, Bakker, Minchin
 * pendulum swinging away from "hard Parryism": oral theorists drawing more and more on Neoanalysis, some neoanalysts (Kullmann) drawing on oral theory

Selected Bibliography
As it stands in the article at present