Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Foreword by Gregory Nagy, General Editor
Nine Essays on Homer, edited by Miriam Carlisle and Olga Levaniouk, is a volume that evolved out of a 1997 Homer Seminar in Harvard University’s Classics Department. That year, the seminar was conducted jointly by Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermeule and myself, and it was attended regularly by Charles Segal (traces of whose helpful advice are evident on many a page). Eight of the original seminarians, plus an enatos coopted by them, have put together a set of essays that achieve a unity of purpose in their systematic application of methods originally perfected at Harvard by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the course of their pioneering research on living oral poetic traditions.
The methodological expertise of the nine contributors is matched by their sharp appreciation of the mechanics and esthetics of Homeric poetry. All nine treat Homer as literature, and they do so in rigorously historical terms, keeping foremost in mind the literary reception of Homer in the Classical era and beyond.
This book’s scholarly ambidexterity in literature on the one hand and in history, archaeology, and art history on the other reflects the intellectual legacy of Emily Vermeule at Harvard. Her own cumulative work as a Classicist has been a model of interdisciplinarity for this book—and it may shine as an ideal for the entire “Greek Studies” series.
—Gregory Nagy
Building on the foundations of scholarship within the disciplines of philology, philosophy, history, and archaeology, the Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches series published by Rowman & Littlefield concerns not just the archaic and classical periods of Greek traditions but the whole continuum—along with all the discontinuities—from the second millennium BCE to the present. The aim is to enhance perspectives by applying various disciplines to problems that have in the past been treated as the exclusive concern of a single given discipline. Besides the crossing-over of the older disciplines, as in the case of historical and literary studies, the series encourages the application of such newer ones as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and comparative literature. It also encourages encounters with current trends in methodology, especially in the realm of literary theory.
The Center for Hellenic Studies offers free access to over 100 books and articles. Professor Gregory Nagy has devoted over five decades to the study of Homer and oral tradition. Readers might also enjoy:
- Albert Bates Lord, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition
- Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales
- Albert Bates Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale
- Gregory Nagy, Homer the Classic
- Gregory Nagy, Homer the Preclassic
- Gregory Nagy, Homeric Questions
- Gregory Nagy, Homeric Responses
- Gregory Nagy, Homer’s Text and Language
- Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past
- Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond
- Milman Parry, L’Épithète Traditionnelle dans Homère : Essai sur un problème de style Homérique
- Milman Parry, Les formules et la métrique d’Homère
Nagy’s most recent research and latest thinking on Homer is also available through Classical Inqiuries.
- Picturing Homer as a cult hero
- A variation on the idea of a gleam that blinded Homer
- What is on Homer’s mind?
- Pindar’s Homer is not “our” Homer
- “Life of Homer” myths as evidence for the reception of Homer