Homeric voices : discourse, memory, gender / Elizabeth Minchin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Minchin, Elizabeth.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Homer--Criticism and interpretation.

Homer.

Rhetoric, Ancient.

Speech in literature.

Oratory, Ancient.

Speeches, addresses, etc., Greek--History and criticism--Theory.

Speeches, addresses, etc., Greek.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

ix, 310 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

Although there has been considerable interest over time in the composition of narrative sections of the Homeric epics-type-scenes and similes, in particular-there have been very few studies, from a compositional point of view, of the substantial speeches and exchanges of speech that Homer depicts in his songs. Homeric Voices is an attempt to redress the balance. Drawing on research in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, Elizabeth Minchin considers the words that Homer attributes to his characters from two perspectives, as cognitive and as social phenomena. She asks how the poet worked with memory to generate the speech forms that he represents: can we discern models for these units of speech? What is the relationship between Homeric voices and the speech of the everyday world of the poet? And she asks how Homeric speech constructs and reveals the social hierarchies that are bound up with age, status, and gender-especially with gender-in the world of the poems. In bringing research of this kind to bear on the Homeric epics, Minchin throws light on the oral poet's practice as he composed his tales, as well as on the interactions that he represents within them.

Part I, Discourse and Memory, offers a series of studies of the ways in which the poet formats speech acts, such as rebukes, and the ways in which he constructs the questions he puts on the lips of his characters. Part II, Discourse and Gender, studies the speech of Homer's characters as a social phenomenon, as language in use. The principal exercise here is to identify differences between the speech of men and the speech of women, using as points of reference a number of observations on men and women's talk in Western cultures in our own time.

Contents:

Part I Discourse and Memory 1

1 Speech Acts in Homer: The Rebuke as a Case Study 23

2 On Declining an Invitation: Context, Form, and Function 52

3 Questions in the Odyssey: Rhythm and Regularity 74

4 Hysteron Proteron in Questions and Answers 102

5 Verbal Behaviour in its Social Context: Three Question Strategies in the Odyssey 117

Part II Discourse and Gender 143

6 Linguistic Choices in Homer: Rebukes and Protests 145

7 Competitive and Co-operative Strategies I: Information-Questions 175

8 Competitive and Co-operative Strategies II: Directives 188

9 Competitive and Co-operative Strategies III: Interruptions 222

10 Storytelling and Gender 245

Index Locorum 303.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [288]-302) and indexes.

ISBN:

9780199280124

0199280126

OCLC:

77011418