Particles and discourse organization in Homer and Pindar

 

The story teller’s path

Particles and discourse organization in Homer and Pindar

 As the second in a series of three workshops, the Emmy Noether research group working on ‘Pragmatic Functions and Meanings of Ancient Greek Particles’ is organizing a meeting in Heidelberg to discuss particles and discourse organization in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Pindar’s Victory Odes. Bringing together classicists from different geographic and scholarly backgrounds, the aim of this workshop is to shed new light on how the genius of these two story tellers is reflected in the language of their compositions.

 Homer gives us the earliest Western ‘works of literature’ that have survived from antiquity, and Pindar’s odes form the only corpus of archaic Greek lyric to have survived anywhere near completely. It is exactly for these reasons that we must engage with them in our project to re-evaluate the pragmatic functions and meanings of ancient Greek particles. Though already thoroughly studied, the Homeric and Pindaric corpora cannot be ignored when working on early Greek language.

 Discussing the two authors together may seem counterintuitive, as they are the exponents of two very different genres. Homeric Epic is a corpus of versified stories about the Heroic Greek past, unified in two great epics that became fundamental to panhellenic culture soon after their creation and remained classics until present day. Pindar’s lyric, on the other hand, was conceived in the form of songs intended primarily for one time, place, and recipient. Although he draws heavily on Homeric material, as does all of Greek literature, Pindar’s stories differ from Homer’s not only in content but also in form and function. The Homeric epics were conceived as single works only at the end of a long prehistory of oral composition and recomposition, preserving in its language many traces of this earlier process. In the more condensed compositions of Pindar, every word is carefully chosen and serves to contribute to the praise of the song’s recipient.

 Differences in the genre and in the conception of these corpora are of course at once a challenge and an opportunity. Studying Homeric epic and Pindar’s songs offers the unique chance to compare the strategies of two of our oldest story tellers over larger and multiple stretches of text. I posit that for any author two things must hold: (1) the language used reflects (in some way) the author’s cognitive processes involved in creating the discourse; (2) the language used is intended to guide the cognitive processes and path to be followed by the hearer. It might be hypothesized that one would find more signs of (1) in the Homeric corpus, considering the traces of oral composition in its text, but (2) is a necessary and often identifiable component of any text.

 Particles have been called roadsigns, a characterization especially apt for Greek particles, and it is not hard to see how particles as roadsigns connect to the two ideas posited above. Greeks use the metaphor of a road to describe how they tell stories, and in a more general way they might have extended it to apply to the entire language. Just as one needs little signs as reminders the entire way and expects larger signs at major crossroads, particles guided Greek hearers from clause to clause, and signalled more significant narrative steps with more marked constructions.

 All participants of the workshop are familiar with the story telling prowess of one or both of the authors, and their knowledge will provide the depth necessary to appreciate the amount to which different aspects of the narrative are reflected in the language. This will hopefully lead to an appreciation of how the two authors use language to give form to their discourse strategies in telling their stories. The speakers will be free to engage with a substantial passage from either or both authors, and analyze the dialectic and reciprocity between language, narrative structure, and content – with a focus on particles.

 On the second day of the workshop, the material discussed by the speakers will form the basis for an open discussion of several famous and/or problematic stretches of text that may profit from a fresh investigation on the level of language.

 

Kontakt:
Mark de Kreij
Seminar für Klassische Philologie
Marstallhof 2-4
69117 Heidelberg
Telefon: +40 (0) 6221 54-2562
E-Mail: de_kreij@uni-heidelberg.de

 

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Letzte Änderung: 13.12.2011
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