Class 2 Epic and Homer

1
Class 2 Epic and Homer

• Appetizer

2
(No Transcript)
3
(No Transcript)
4
Literature Humanities

• Humanities C1001-C1002 Masterpieces of Western
  literature and philosophy
• Popularly known as Literature Humanities or
  Lit Hum, this yearlong course offers Columbia
  College students the opportunity to engage in
  intensive study and discussion of some of the
  most significant texts of Western culture.

5

• The course is not a survey, but a series of
  careful readings of literary works that reward
  both first encounters and long study. Whether
  class work focuses on the importance of the text
  to literary history or on its significance to our
  contemporary culture, the goal is to consider
  particular conceptions of what it means to be
  human as well as the place of such conceptions in
  the development of critical thought.

6

• The principal objectives of Literature Humanities
  are to teach students to analyze literary texts
  and to construct intellectual arguments. An
  interdepartmental staff of professorial and
  preceptorial (????)faculty meets with groups of
  approximately twenty-two students for four hours
  a week in order to discuss texts by Homer,
  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus,
  Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Vergil,
  Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne,
  Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoevsky, and Woolf, as
  well as Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament
  writings.

7

• Taught by members of the Departments of Classics,
  English and Comparative Literature, French,
  German, Italian, Middle East and Asian Languages
  and Cultures, Philosophy, Religion, Slavic
  Languages, and Spanish and members of the
  Society of Fellows. Major works by over twenty
  authors, ranging in time, theme, and genre from
  Homer to Virginia Woolf. Students are expected to
  write at least two papers, to complete two
  examinations each semester, and to participate
  actively in class discussions

8
Contemporary Civilization C1101-C1102
Introduction to contemporary civilization in the
west.

• The central purpose of Contemporary
  Civilization or CC is to introduce students to
  a range of issues concerning the kinds of
  communities political, social, moral, and
  religiousthat human beings construct for
  themselves and the values that inform and define
  such communities the course is intended to
  prepare students to become active and informed
  citizens..

9

• Founded in 1919 as a course on War and Peace
  Issues, Contemporary Civilization has evolved
  continuously, while remaining a constant and
  essential element of the Columbia College
  curriculum. The course asks students to read
  closely texts in various traditions of argument
  and to construct arguments of their own, both in
  speech and in writing, about some of the explicit
  and implicit issues these texts raise

10

• Both the form and the content of the course
  contribute to the achievement of its aims. The
  discussion format is intended to respond in a
  palpable way to the existence in these traditions
  of different and often conflicting points of
  view to embody the possibility of reasoned
  discourse among people who hold disparate
  convictions and to help students sharpen their
  own skills of thought and argument about matters
  of current personal and civic concern through
  participating in and extending the debates of the
  past.

11

• The Contemporary Civilization syllabus introduces
  students to a set of ideas and arguments that
  have played a formative role in the political and
  cultural history of our time, alerts them to
  ideas that have not held an influential role in
  that history, and acquaints them with some
  exemplars of critical thinking about alternative
  cultures, institutions, and practices.

12
Poetry

• Why does poetry exist ?What is poetry about ?
• THE HUMAN heart has ever dreamed of a fairer
  world than the one it knows. No man, however dark
  his spirit, however cramped his senses, is quite
  without the yearning after wider horizons and a
  purer air. In a happy moment earth seems to hold
  for all the promise of larger things. The moment
  passes and the world closes in again, actual,
  bare, unyielding, as before.

13

• What each of us is seeking the poet has already
  found. Poetry is the step beyond, which we were
  about to take, but were not certain of the way.
  In our experience from year to year, we are not
  without glimpses of beauty in the world, a sense
  of meaning somewhere within the shows of things.

14

• Of this beauty and this meaning poetry is a
  fuller revelation. The poet gives us back the
  world we already know, though it is a world
  transfigured he draws his material from stores
  to which we all have access, but with a
  difference. His vision, clearer and more
  penetrating, transfigures the facts and discloses
  the beauty only waiting to be thus revealed.

15

• THE ORIGIN AND COURSE OF NARRATIVE POETRY
• The older poetry of a people takes shape around a
  story. Childhood dearly loves a tale for its
  simple heart finds the way out of a reality it
  does not understand by contriving a world of
  make-believe. The young imagination, not yet
  beset by too urgent actualities, admits no bounds
  to its wide exercise.

16

• The imagination of childhood demands action,
  deeds done and stories told,high adventures of
  gods and heroes, or the tangled fortunes of
  princes and damsels, of knights and captive
  ladies, of fairies and sprites. So a fable builds
  itself out of free imaginings.

17

• The love of a story never passes. All through its
  long history, in every land and among every
  people, poetry has not ceased to interest itself
  in all conceivable happenings of life. But the
  stream of poetry is fed by many sources, and it
  takes color and volume according to the channels
  through which it flows.

18

• Iliad
• Enoch Arden" is a poem published in 1864 by
  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, during his tenure as
  England's Poet Laureate.

19

• This movement, as each nation develops its own
  art and culture, has been in the direction from
  the general to the particular, from the interests
  of the entire nation to the affairs of private
  persons.

20

• CHARACTERISTICS OF PRIMITIVE POETRY
• All nations have their own distinctive
  beginnings, and these are widely distributed in
  time the term earlier, therefore, is relative
  to each nation. Examples of such earlier poetry
  are the Iliad and the Odyssey, on the one
  handthough these represent the culmination
  rather than the beginning of an age,

21

• The story is told and retold passing from lip to
  lip, it receives changes and additions. Again,
  finally, some one, unknown by name, gives it the
  form in which it is written down and so
  preserved. But it is the poetry of a people
  rather than of a man.

22

• This poetry has certain traits which serve to
  mark it as popular or national. In the case of
  poems of greater scope, like the Iliad or
  Beowulf, it deals with action in the large. The
  heroes whose deeds it celebrates are the
  possession of the kindred or the race they are
  kings and men of might or valor, known to all in
  the national traditions. Even the gods are not
  absent they play a dominant part in the action.

23

• One characteristic these tales have which, apart
  from their form as verse, makes them poetry. The
  world which they give back is idealized. They
  come into being in response to mens love of a
  story. But the action which they embody is not
  the petty and commonplace round of daily affairs
  the action is heightened and intensified.
• lofty, noble, sublime

24
Homer and the Epic
25

• EPIC poetry might be described as that in which
  fewest poets have achieved distinction.
• Homer, Virgil, Milton
• treated a large theme with the dignity, grandeur,
  and beauty which the heroic poem demands.

26
Biography of Homer

• Little can be known with certainty. But even
  though the details of Homer's life remain and
  probably will always remain? an enigma, his great
  epics come down to us intact.
• His works have formed a foundation for all the
  Western literature that has followed, and his
  characters and stories have had an impact on
  three thousand years' worth of readers. Facts
  about the poet's life can do little to add to
  that legacy.

27
Trojan War

• No other texts in the Western imagination occupy
  as central a position in the self-definition of
  Western culture as the two epic poems of Homer,
  the Iliad and the Odyssey . They both concern the
  great defining moment of Greek culture, the
  Trojan War.

28

• This war, however, fired the imaginations of the
  Greeks and became the defining cultural moment in
  their history. Technically, the war wasn't fought
  by "Greeks" in the classical sense, it was fought
  by the Myceneaens the Greek culture that we call
  "classical" is actually derived from a different
  group of Greeks, the Dorians and Ionians.
  However, the Greeks saw the Trojan War as the
  first moment in history when the Greeks came
  together as one people with a common purpose.

29

• If the Greeks regarded the Trojan War as the
  defining moment of their culture, they did so
  because of the poetry of Homer. It would not be
  unfair to regard the Homeric poems as the single
  most important texts in Greek culture. While the
  Greeks all gained their collective identity from
  the Trojan War, that collective identity was
  concentrated in the values, ethics, and narrative
  of Homer's epic poems.

30
(No Transcript)
31
(No Transcript)
32

• As the Trojan War was the product of Mycenean
  culture, the Homeric poems were the product of
  the Greek Dark Ages. Whatever happened at Troy,
  the events were probably so captivating, that the
  Greeks continued to narrate the stories long
  after they had abandoned their cities and
  abandoned writing.

33

• These stories probably began as short tales of
  isolated events and heroes eventually a
  profession of story-telling was
  establishedclassical scholars call this new
  professional a "bard." This new professional
  began combining the stories into larger
  narratives as the narratives grew, the technique
  of story-telling changed as well.

34

• Although historical, archaeological, and
  linguistic evidence suggests that the epics were
  composed between 750 and 650 b.c., they are set
  in Mycenaean Greece in about the twelfth century
  b.c., during the Bronze Age. This earlier period,
  the Greeks believed, was a more glorious and
  sublime age, when gods still frequented the earth
  and heroic, godlike mortals with superhuman
  attributes populated Greece

35

• Odyssey
• the hero Odysseus man of deceit and trick
• It tells the story of his nostos, or journey
  home, to northwest Greece during the ten-year
  period after the Greek victory over the Trojans.
  A tale of wandering, it takes place not on a
  field of battle but on fantastic islands and
  foreign lands.
• Nostalgia

36

• Of the two epics, the Odyssey is the later both
  in setting and, probably, date of composition.
• Like the Iliad, the Odyssey was composed
  primarily in the Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek,
  which was spoken on the Aegean islands and in the
  coastal settlements of Asia Minor, now modern
  Turkey.
• .

37

• After the unrelenting tragedy and carnage of the
  Iliad, the Odyssey often strikes readers as comic
  or surreal at times. This quality has led some
  scholars to conclude that Homer wrote the Odyssey
  at a later time of his life, when he showed less
  interest in struggles at arms and was more
  receptive to a storyline that focused on the
  fortunes and misadventures of a single man

38
Odysseuss World Ancient Greece
39
(No Transcript)
40

• Greece, unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, is not a
  place that is easy to live in.
• Infertile soil
• Lots of mountains
• Less fresh water
• Coastline/beaches/numerous islands

41

• Good sailing VS lousy farming
• Such environment made Greeks try to get living
  from seas.
• Sailors/ soldiers / pirate/ traders / adventurers
  
• Trojan War piracy/raiding

42

• The Greek landscape is beautiful but austere.
• Laurence Durrell
• You should see the landscape of Greece. It
  would break your heart.
• Spirit of Place

43

• The lands dazzling variety of colors, textures,
  temperatures, sounds and smells, constantly
  surprises the eye, the ear, the nose and the
  heart. But Greece has no harsh extremes. There
  are no hot deserts or frozen tundra here, no
  great plains or soaring mountains, no grand
  canyons or giant volcanoes.

44

• Everything seems to be made in a smaller, more
  human scale. The bright sunlight caresses every
  surface to expose the deepest blue of the sea,
  the startling white of stones and houses, the
  brilliant green of pine forests, wheat fields and
  olive groves, the richest red and yellow of
  flowers.

45

• The ubiquitous smell of the sea blends smoothly
  with the pungent smell of mountain oregano, thyme
  or pine it mixes well with the sweet scent of
  jasmine, lavender, basil (?? ) or bay(???), and
  brings out the best aromas from vineyards,
  wineries, orange groves or freshly baked bread.

46

• Nicholas Gage
• The red unpromising soil was sown with stones,
  but it brought forth
• the gods, the heroes, and the philosophers, the
  literature, the architecture, and the art. These
  people (Hellenes) created one of the brightest,
  longest lasting, and most

47

• Yet when you walk among the stones of Greece and
  experience that combination of light and water
  and earth that is the Greek landscape, it all
  becomes inevitable. No other land could have
  produced such a people, and this land could have
  produced nothing else.
• Portrait of Greece

48
Highlight of Landscape Agora

• "Agora" in Greek literally means "a place of
  gathering" and the Agora of Athens was the heart
  of Athenian life in Ancient times. For centuries
  It served as a busy marketplace where merchants
  and artisans had congregated to offer their goods
  to all who gathered, and it also provided a
  platform for the Athenian political and
  intellectual life.

49

• This is the place where Aristocrats and Tyrants
  enforced their rule on their Athenian subjects,
  and where later the concept of "direct democracy"
  was born and flourished. The Agora was the
  physical place where every Athenian citizen
  gathered to conduct their business, participate
  in their city's governance, decide judicial
  matters, express their opinion for all who cared
  to listen, and elect their city officials.

50

• For every free Athenian citizen, participating in
  such "common" activities was not merely a duty,
  but instead it was a privilege and an honor. In
  fact, the term "idiot" (idiotishe who acts on
  his/her own) was used to mock those who avoided
  participation in the common citizen activities.

51
(No Transcript)
52
Odysseus' Journey
53
(No Transcript)
54
(No Transcript)
55
Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis
56
Corfu Island

• Homers Odyssey describes Corfu as the island of
  the hospitable Phaeikes, who enabled him after a
  ten years journey to return home to Ithaca.

57
(No Transcript)
58
(No Transcript)
59
(No Transcript)
60
(No Transcript)
61
(No Transcript)
62
(No Transcript)
63
Plot Overview

• A large and rowdy mob of suitors who have overrun
  Odysseuss palace and pillaged his land continue
  to court his wife.
• Prince Telemachus
• The beautiful nymph Calypso
• Athena, Odysseuss strongest supporter among the
  gods
• Poseidons wrath

64
Character list

• Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess
• the Land of the Lotus Eaters
• his battle with Polyphemus the Cyclops,
• his love affair with the witch-goddess Circe, his
  temptation by the deadly Sirens,
• his journey into Hades to consult the prophet
  Tiresias,
• his fight with the sea monster Scylla.

65
Major Themes

• Home, wandering, and fidelity
• Cunning and disguise
• Women as predatory
• Odysseus' character flaws
• The power of the gods
• Hospitality

66
Textual Reading
67
(No Transcript)
68
(No Transcript)