Search Results

This chapter examines the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare's engagement with the work of the Homerist and folklorist Albert Lord. This discussion is prefaced by a review of cross-disciplinary shifts in the understanding and definition of epic in the 20th century, and the effect that these shifts had on the relationship between literature, oral epic, and Homeric poetry. Turning to Kadare, the chapter explains some of the ways in which Lord's research inspired Kadare's novel The File on H through its different Albanian, French, and English incarnations. In particular, it suggests that Lord's research on Serbian epic and its relationship with Homer enabled Kadare to sidestep the conventional canon of Western literature, but that this same strategy of appealing to Lord's work also serves to inscribe Kadare's own work within mainstream European literature.

This chapter considers Milman Parry's contribution to Homeric scholarship and uses this to investigate shifts in conceptions of epic and its place in the Western literary tradition in the 20th century. It points to unresolved tensions in approaches to Homer in the 20th century, with scholars and other receivers of Homer equivocating between the idea that Homeric epic belonged to the world of traditional, oral-derived poetry, and the view that Homer is the starting point of a linear history of Western literature. It suggests that notions of tradition and reception need to be investigated in relation to one another. Recent scholarship on oral traditions now accommodates many phenomena that Parry associated exclusively with the great authors of the Western literary canon, such as Apollonius and Virgil, so the relationship between oral traditions and the canon needs to be revised. Meanwhile creative receptions of Homer have found ways of embracing the traditional Homer and the canonical Homer at the same time.

By relating Homer's speech-formats to cognitive psychology's account of the storage of implicit knowledge, conclusions can be drawn about the mind-based resources on which the poet drew as he sang—and on which we draw as we speak. It is argued that the Homeric rebuke was a stylized version of everyday discourse, cued by the rebuke format that the poet had acquired, almost unconsciously, early in life and stored in memory. What the apprentice poet learned from a master-singer was not the rebuke itself, but the special formulation of the rebuke for the purposes of oral song.

We know a lot about which words go together in our native language. In English we say “She caught a cold and then the flu.” We would never say “She caught the cold and then a flu.” Often we cannot articulate a rule for such knowledge—we just pick it up from hearing language in use. Counterpoint in music was learned the same way. Millions of combinations of tones were possible, but only certain combinations were preferred. Linguists call them “collocations,” meaning things co-located much more frequently than might be expected if combinations were random. The chapter surveys several contrapuntal collocations taught in Naples.