Epic Facework
Self-presentation and social interaction in Homer
by Ruth Scodel
Hardback (Published)
(December 2008)
ISBN: 9781905125227
6.1 x 9.17 inches
Price: $77.00
In stock
Homer’s characters are often very far from an unreflecting struggle for status at others’ expense. Rather than being a ‘zero-sum game’, their negotiations can be of an impressive delicacy, designed to protect the ‘face’ of the other. Gifts and visible deference are important measures of honour, but characters also care about what others really feel. This sensitive study reveals that at the beginnings of (surviving) Greek literature Homer’s audience is expected to appreciate psychology and self-control of a very high order. Literary analysts, historians, anthropologists and indeed archaeologists will have much to learn here about the general level of sophistication of the historic and prehistoric societies which generated such deeply civilized poetry.
Ruth Scodel is the author of Listening to Homer (2002), Credible Impossibilities: Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy (1999), and many other books and articles, mostly on Greek poetry. She is the co-author with Anja Bettenworth of Whither Quo Vadis? Sienkiewicz’s Novel in Film and Television (2008). Scodel is D.R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. She edited Transactions of the American Philological Association from 1987 to 1991, and is an editor of the series Texte und Kommentare. In 2007 she was President of the American Philological Association.
- By (author) Ruth Scodel
Other Titles in this Series
The Power of Individual and Community in Ancient Athens and Beyond
Essays in Honour of John K. Davies
Similar Books
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises
J. M. G. Le Clézio - Enseigner les littératures francophones aujourd’hui - Récit de soi et expérience de l’illusion (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles)
Volume 78
Cahiers de littérature française
Les Métamorphoses du texte. Enjeux intertextuels et transpositions visuelles
Volume 25
Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes – Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies
Volume 51
Cahiers de sémiotique des cultures
Ponctuation et sens. Nouvelles perspectives / Punctuation and meaning. New perspectives
Volume 6
CompLit
Myth, Folklore and Magic in European Literatures. Critical and Contemporary Reconfigurations
Contesting Labeled Identities
The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature
Dis/United States of Vulnerability
Literary and Cultural Transgressions in U.S. Poetry Since the 1960s
Volume 330
Drunk the Potion, No Whit Charmed
The Doctrine of Pure and Perfect Souls from Iamblichus to Damascius
Epigraphic “Shades” from Hellenistic Thrace
Contextualizing Inscriptions in Greek from Thracian Tombs
Epiphanies of the Divine in the Septuagint and the New Testament
Fifth International Symposium of the Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti (CJHNT), 14-17 May 2015, Nottingham
European Drama and Performance Studies
Dramatisations politiques. Théâtre, politique et idéologie au XIXe siècle (1806-1914)
Volume 27
