ENG 317U

For Thurs: WT Acts II-III

We'll leave most of the ancillary stuff for next week, I think. 
Find appended this brief note on citation: Download Citingshakespeare 

Stumbled across this bit about Robert Greene and patronage in the Norton Anthology of British Lit., cf. with Shakespeare's experience with Southampton: 

“Greene. . .had sixteen different patrons for seventeen books, [which] suggests that he did not find much favor or support from any one of them. Indeed, a practice grew up of printing off several dedications to be inserted into particular copies of a book, so that an impecunious author could deceive each of several patrons into thinking that he or she was the uniquely fortunate person to be honored by the volume.”(NAEL, vol. B, 500)

Christopher Hitchens on the Acropolis Museum

Not sure if anyone is still reading out there (actually, I feel sure no one is), but this bit by Christopher Hitchens on the Acropolis Museum is worth a read.

Discusses the new Parthenon museum, and the arguments for repatriation of the so-called "Elgin Marbles" from the British Museum to Greece.

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Questions? spollack@pdx.edu
Be Seeing You,
sean

Notes on Homer, etc. and Open Thread for Final Exam

Consider this your open exam thread!
Here are notes on Odyssey, Homer, and GBB.

Download Notes-homer-gbb-eng317

Going Forward: Mythopoeia

Inevitably, we confront the problem of why people create myths, stories, and narratives. And just as inevitably, we confront the question: are they necessary? What purpose do they serve, and can we justify spending our finite resources on understanding them?
Anyone who's take a class of mine in the past will have heard my take on this, but I believe that myth, literature, and narrative are not merely vestigial and neat, like the tail fins on a '59 Caddy, but perhaps central to our evolution, and our very survival: Fiction and mimesis are part of basic evolutionary strategies that help us learn our own continuation as a species. Fiction helps create the capacity for empathy. Most mythic stories have "pro-social" values attached to them: respect, honesty, kindness, altruism.
It may be true that "mythic" thinking represents a means of negotiating and understanding the world that is non/pre-scientific. However, it's a means of creating the world as well as understanding it, insofar as each culture, nation, and individual struggles to create a coherent narrative out of the mass of conflicting data that is reality. It's never gone out of style, as far as I can tell: information becomes narratives (stories) and stories become a myth: a story that has a larger purpose- the origin of things, the creation of identities, the meaning of a taboo, ritual or custom whose origins are lost.
Mythopoeia (sometimes: mythopoesis) is a word that describes the making of myth. Often the makings of a myth are mysterious, but quite often we can watch the process of myth creation.

The Odyssey is not only a primary text of myth, but also a meditation on the process of mythopoeia: Odysseus himself is a story teller, as is Penelope, and Odysseus confronts in Book 8 the consequences of his own participation in the downfall of Troy as a story told by the aoidos. Odysseus becomes his own aoidos, and the one man he spares in Book 24 is the aoidos, who will tell the tale of the slaughter of the suitors. The Odyssey is both mythic and self-reflexive in a way that other mythic texts are not. We are accustomed to thinking of the self-reflexivity of narrative being a (post)modern preoccupation, but we can see it is at least as old as Homer. And so the need to create myth inevitably brings about the need to reflect on myth—you can't have one without the other.

Suggestions for further reading:
Lenardon and Morford, Classical Mythology (8 ed, Oxford, 2008)
Kerenyi, K. The Gods of the Ancient Greeks
Kerenyi, K. The Heroes of Ancient Greeks.

Gods Behaving Badly in series development

From Andrew:

So, I just figured that I had to share this with the class as kind of a funny little addition to our discussion about "Gods Behaving Badly"... I think someone was talking about how it was kind of like a sitcom (ala "Friends") when we were going over what the book was about, and now it turns out that it was in development to become an actual television program... I think it still has tremendous promise...
Its also interesting to read what the author thinks about that idea.

The article also mentions Margaret Atwood's Penelopeiad (which is what it sounds like: the Odyssey from her POV). Also, Portland-based scifi/fantasy author Ursula LeGuin has a novel that tells the Aeneid from Lavinia's POV as well. . .

Hedwig and the Angry Inch: "Origin of Love"

The Origin of Love
Uploaded by jief75 - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Based on Aristophanes' explanation in Plato's Symposium.

Thanks to Kira

Lyrics to this song available here.

Lego Odyssey: Books 10-12 (Aelous, Circe, The Land of the Dead)

Thanks to Alexis

More Pop: "Home at Last" by Steely Dan

This is the song with someone's dorky photomontage. . . but they definitely get the point of the lyrics across. . . The Odyssey in 5 min 29 sec.

Homer who?

Homer is endlessly interesting because he's so influential, and yet so insubstantial. By this I mean the Iliad and Odyssey are the two most influential, long lived texts in the western tradition, and yet we have nothing to say with any confidence about the person whose name is attached to them. Classical Greek writers - Plato, Aristotle in particular - talk with confidence about Homer. And whatever the myth or reality that accrues around the name, the name itself holds enormous sway over all Latin and European literary culture.
George Chapman's 1616 translation of Iliad and Odyssey include a lengthy preface in which he excuses the great amount of "death" in Homer, because he is a compendium of life. It had been only a century or so since knowledge of ancient Greek was revived in the west, and Homer seemed to be suddenly brought to life, in his own language, instead of Latin paraphrases and translation. And coinciding with Chapman's 1616 translation, there was a renewed philological interest in early forms of English. And so Chaucer became the "English Homer" - the inventor of English poetry. So Homer becomes a convenient figuration for the beginnings. The myth of Homer endures because it provides a stable point of origin for that whose origins are irretrievably lost. And even if it does no real good to insist on an author for the Iliad and Odyssey, the fiction of Homer does no real harm either.