Author: Rachel H. Lesser
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269166X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
This is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way, and to explain its relationship to the epic's narrative structure and audience reception. Rachel H. Lesser offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters' desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters' desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as eros, himeros, pothe, menos, thumos, boule, and eeldor, as well as through the epic's thematic emotions of grief and anger. Desire in the Iliad shows how the mortals' and gods' triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus' withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the "superplot" of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener's-or reader's-own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad's full story, sympathetic desire for characters' welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.
Desire in the Iliad
Author: Rachel H. Lesser
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269166X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
This is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way, and to explain its relationship to the epic's narrative structure and audience reception. Rachel H. Lesser offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters' desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters' desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as eros, himeros, pothe, menos, thumos, boule, and eeldor, as well as through the epic's thematic emotions of grief and anger. Desire in the Iliad shows how the mortals' and gods' triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus' withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the "superplot" of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener's-or reader's-own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad's full story, sympathetic desire for characters' welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269166X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
This is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way, and to explain its relationship to the epic's narrative structure and audience reception. Rachel H. Lesser offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters' desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters' desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as eros, himeros, pothe, menos, thumos, boule, and eeldor, as well as through the epic's thematic emotions of grief and anger. Desire in the Iliad shows how the mortals' and gods' triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus' withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the "superplot" of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener's-or reader's-own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad's full story, sympathetic desire for characters' welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.
The Iliad of Homer
Author: Homer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 118
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 118
Book Description
The Shield of Achilles
Author: W. H. Auden
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691256586
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
Back in print for the first time in decades, Auden’s National Book Award–winning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous title poem, which reimagines Achilles’s shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences—“Bucolics” and “Horae Canonicae”—that Auden believed to be among his most significant work. Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden’s collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work. As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection “is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.” Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691256586
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
Back in print for the first time in decades, Auden’s National Book Award–winning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous title poem, which reimagines Achilles’s shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences—“Bucolics” and “Horae Canonicae”—that Auden believed to be among his most significant work. Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden’s collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work. As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection “is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.” Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.
The Heart of Achilles
Author: Graham Zanker
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
Explores the moral choices and values Homer offers in his Iliad
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
Explores the moral choices and values Homer offers in his Iliad
The Twenty-second Book of the Iliad
Author: Homer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Epic poetry, Greek
Languages : en
Pages : 92
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Epic poetry, Greek
Languages : en
Pages : 92
Book Description
The Iliad
Author: Homer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172
Book Description
Ransom
Author: David Malouf
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307378934
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
In his first novel in more than a decade, award-winning author David Malouf reimagines the pivotal narrative of Homer’s Iliad—one of the most famous passages in all of literature. This is the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and woeful Priam, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. A moving tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom is incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and its unstated imperative that we imagine our lives in the glow of fellow feeling.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307378934
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
In his first novel in more than a decade, award-winning author David Malouf reimagines the pivotal narrative of Homer’s Iliad—one of the most famous passages in all of literature. This is the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and woeful Priam, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. A moving tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom is incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and its unstated imperative that we imagine our lives in the glow of fellow feeling.
War Music
Author: Christopher Logue
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571209071
Category : Achilles (Greek mythology)
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
This text contains the first three volumes of Christopher Logue's recomposition of Homer's Iliad - Kings, The Husbands and War Music.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571209071
Category : Achilles (Greek mythology)
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
This text contains the first three volumes of Christopher Logue's recomposition of Homer's Iliad - Kings, The Husbands and War Music.
Desiring the Good
Author: Katja Maria Vogt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190692472
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Desiring the Good defends a novel and distinctive approach in ethics that is inspired by ancient philosophy. Ethics, according to this approach, starts from one question and its most immediate answer: "what is the good for human beings?"--"a well-going human life." Ethics thus conceived is broader than moral philosophy. It includes a range of topics in psychology and metaphysics. Plato's Philebus is the ancestor of this approach. Its first premise, defended in Book I of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, is that the final agential good is the good human life. Though Aristotle introduces this premise while analyzing human activities, it is absent from approaches in the theory of action that self-identify as Aristotelian. This absence, Vogt argues, is a deep and far-reaching mistake, one that can be traced back to Elizabeth Anscombe's influential proposals. And yet, the book is Anscombian in spirit. It engages with ancient texts in order to contribute to philosophy today, and it takes questions about the human mind to be prior to, and relevant to, substantive normative matters. In this spirit, Desiring the Good puts forward a new version of the Guise of the Good, namely that desire to have one's life go well shapes and sustains mid- and small-scale motivations. A theory of good human lives, it is argued, must make room for a plurality of good lives. Along these lines, the book lays out a non-relativist version of Protagoras's Measure Doctrine and defends a new kind of realism about good human lives.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190692472
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Desiring the Good defends a novel and distinctive approach in ethics that is inspired by ancient philosophy. Ethics, according to this approach, starts from one question and its most immediate answer: "what is the good for human beings?"--"a well-going human life." Ethics thus conceived is broader than moral philosophy. It includes a range of topics in psychology and metaphysics. Plato's Philebus is the ancestor of this approach. Its first premise, defended in Book I of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, is that the final agential good is the good human life. Though Aristotle introduces this premise while analyzing human activities, it is absent from approaches in the theory of action that self-identify as Aristotelian. This absence, Vogt argues, is a deep and far-reaching mistake, one that can be traced back to Elizabeth Anscombe's influential proposals. And yet, the book is Anscombian in spirit. It engages with ancient texts in order to contribute to philosophy today, and it takes questions about the human mind to be prior to, and relevant to, substantive normative matters. In this spirit, Desiring the Good puts forward a new version of the Guise of the Good, namely that desire to have one's life go well shapes and sustains mid- and small-scale motivations. A theory of good human lives, it is argued, must make room for a plurality of good lives. Along these lines, the book lays out a non-relativist version of Protagoras's Measure Doctrine and defends a new kind of realism about good human lives.
The Cambridge Companion to Sappho
Author: P. J. Finglass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108100171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 587
Book Description
No ancient poet has a wider following today than Sappho; her status as the most famous woman poet from Greco-Roman antiquity, and as one of the most prominent lesbian voices in history, has ensured a continuing fascination with her work down the centuries. The Cambridge Companion to Sappho provides an up-to-date survey of this remarkable, inspiring, and mysterious Greek writer, whose poetic corpus has been significantly expanded in recent years thanks to the discovery of new papyrus sources. Containing an introduction, prologue and thirty-three chapters, the book examines Sappho's historical, social, and literary contexts, the nature of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss, and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan. All Greek is translated, making the volume accessible to everyone interested in one of the most significant creative artists of all time.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108100171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 587
Book Description
No ancient poet has a wider following today than Sappho; her status as the most famous woman poet from Greco-Roman antiquity, and as one of the most prominent lesbian voices in history, has ensured a continuing fascination with her work down the centuries. The Cambridge Companion to Sappho provides an up-to-date survey of this remarkable, inspiring, and mysterious Greek writer, whose poetic corpus has been significantly expanded in recent years thanks to the discovery of new papyrus sources. Containing an introduction, prologue and thirty-three chapters, the book examines Sappho's historical, social, and literary contexts, the nature of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss, and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan. All Greek is translated, making the volume accessible to everyone interested in one of the most significant creative artists of all time.