I recently been thinking about rhetoric, memory, and poetry and how they are interrelated. Along with the Odyssey, I have been reading Plato’s dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus. The dialogues discuss rhetoric as being a “knack” used for persuasion that does not necessarily have anything to do with Truth. Now, it seems to me, that if poetry were put into the equation, and Plato’s metaphysical memory, then Homer seems to embody the, what Plato ambiguously calls, “true rhetorician.”
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But Seriously… Chaucer’s “Ernest Game”
Chaucer takes a comic look at the ernest game of life in how Canterbury Tales. We, as humans, decide that we will take the pilgrimage of life to its ultimate conclusion. We decide to impose that order on our ostensibly quixotic existences — we decide to play the game.
Asmov’s “Reason”
They tried to control QT-1 even before it was born. Man’s newest robot is the subject of Asimov’s 1941 short story “Reason.”
Vico’s Homer
Vico, in his imaginative search for the true Homer, uses the language of reason combined with creative speculation and inductive hypothesizing. Homer, for Vico, is a metaphor for the citizens of ancient Greece. He did not exist as a man, but as a much more powerful entity who lived in the cultural consciousness of the entire nation. Homer himself became a myth — a integral myth for the emergence of Greek polity, poetry, and philosophy.
Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
SGGK is written in long stanzas and short, metered and rhymed, couplets, called “bob” and “wheel,” at the end of each verse. The alliteration, free from rhyme and rhythm, in the long stanzas is obviously influenced by Old English, while the “bob” and “wheel” signifies a Middle English influence.
Notes on Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh is a primary epic, composed over a thousand years by cultural stories of the legendary king, Gilgamesh, who is thought to have historically ruled Uruk circa 2700 BCE. The oral stories were probably assembled by a poet and cast into the narrative form of the epic between 2000 and 1600 BCE and finally written on clay tablets in cuneiform during the reign of Assurbanipol in 668-627 BCE.
The Odyssey: General Notes
Homer’s Odyssey has got to be — still after multiple readings — one of my favorite works of Western Literature. This epic is a nostos, or a story of return, and asks can one come home again, especially after years of bloody war?
