Elizabeth Minchin
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199280124
- eISBN:
- 9780191707070
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199280124.003.12
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter presents a number of conclusions about how a poet in an oral tradition may have formulated and generated the substantial stretches of speech that we encounter in the Iliad and the ...
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This chapter presents a number of conclusions about how a poet in an oral tradition may have formulated and generated the substantial stretches of speech that we encounter in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first area of discussion is memory and discourse: the stylized speech-formats and question and answer patterns that we observe in Homer have their origins in the pre-patterned forms of everyday speech. The second area of discussion is discourse and gender. Here the evidence is not uniform. There are areas of consistency and inconsistency in Homer's representation of men's and women's talk in the worlds he describes.Less
This chapter presents a number of conclusions about how a poet in an oral tradition may have formulated and generated the substantial stretches of speech that we encounter in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first area of discussion is memory and discourse: the stylized speech-formats and question and answer patterns that we observe in Homer have their origins in the pre-patterned forms of everyday speech. The second area of discussion is discourse and gender. Here the evidence is not uniform. There are areas of consistency and inconsistency in Homer's representation of men's and women's talk in the worlds he describes.
