Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: The Homerist’s idea of an oral tradition is necessarily different from that of the students of a living oral tradition. Homer is a text and Homeric orality is a matter of philology. Homerists ’ notions of oral tradition will thus be mediated by textuality, and Homer’s orality can only be accessed through those features that survive the song’s transcription. Regardless of the existence of written texts surrounding an epic tradition, the tradition is an oral one if it is performed periodically and in more than one locale. The tradition’s expansion in place and survival in time, externally manifested in its transformation into writing, is manifested internally in the ideology of epic kléos, glory as conferred on a hero by poetry. The hero’s kléos can become the song’s kléos in a self-conscious awareness that is particularly clear in Homer. (This is not mere literary sophistication, but a tradition’s consciousness of the possibilities of its own medium.) Performance not only constitutes the dimension of the tradition’s
Source: Oral tradition
Author: Egbert J Bakker
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2115088230