By Gregory Nagy
This booklet is a comparative learn of oral poetics in literate cultures, concentrating on the issues of textual fluidity within the transmission of Homeric poetry over part a millennium, from the Archaic during the Hellenistic sessions of historical Greece. It stresses the position of functionality and the performer within the re-creative technique of composition-in-performance. It addresses questions of authority and authorship within the making of oral poetry, and it examines the efforts of historic students to edit a definitive textual content of the "real" Homer.
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Extra resources for Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond
Sample text
39] Applying the observation of Parry and Lord that composition and performance are aspects of the same process in oral traditions, I suggest that authority in performance is a key to the very concept of authorship in composition. [40] In the present example from Jaufré Rudel as well, it is authority in performance that is crucial: the poet’s song does not become authoritative until it is performed in an authorized setting. Only then does the song become real, authentic. Thus the intermediary transmitter is enjoined not to “move” the song of Jaufré Rudel because he is as yet unauthorized to do so.
Ultimately, these questions converge on a more specific question, that is, the relationship of lyric and epic. Epic is more difficult to define diachronically than lyric. The eventual form of ancient Greek epic is more complex than that of “lyric,” despite the fact that epic happens to be the earliest-attested body of literature in Greek history. [14] “Epic” is also more {3|4} difficult to define synchronically, because it is even more deceptive than “lyric” when we apply the distinction between what Plato and Aristotle call diegesis and mimesis.
Introduction: A Brief Survey of Concepts and Aims The two central concepts of this book can be summed up in the words performance and composition, which are to be taken as two different aspects of one process in oral poetics. The emphasis here is on performance, as the title of the book indicates. The basic work on the interaction of performance and composition continues to be Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales. [1] Since we will be concentrating here on the oral poetics of ancient Greece, it is important to stress, from the very start, the importance of Lord’s book for Hellenists.