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The Center for Hellenic Studies and the Council of Independent Colleges
Announce a Seminar for Faculty Members in all Fields
“Homer Across the Curriculum: The Iliad”
July 10-14, 2006, Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC
Nomination Deadline: Friday, February 10, 2006
Directed by Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical
Greek Literature and professor of Comparative Literature, Faculty of the
Arts and Sciences, Harvard University and Kenneth Scott Morrell, associate
professor and chair of Greek and Roman Studies at Rhodes College
Homeric poetry occupies a unique position in the evolution of ancient
Mediterranean civilizations, playing a formative role both in the development
of epic and other performance and literary genres as well as artistic,
political, religious, and even economic conventions in the Greco-Roman
world. Many of these have found their way into our modern cultural contexts.
Our seminar will offer an opportunity to examine the many dimensions of
the Iliad and explore ways the poem can contribute to courses
in a variety of disciplines and inform discussions on topics ranging from
the exchange of luxury goods to the adjudication of disputes arising from
athletic contests.
The first day will focus on an overview of the “Homeric Question,”
that is, what is the role of an individual singer in an oral tradition,
how did performances from an oral tradition become literary artifacts,
and how did the various versions of the written poem evolve into the text
we commonly use today. Our work will also situate the Homeric epics in
their cross-cultural context, by examining the relationship between the
Greek epic tradition and those of other societies, for example, the Sumerians
and Akkadians in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hebrews in the Hebrew
Bible, Indic society in the Mahabharata, and the Persians in
Shahnameh.
The second day will begin with a brief history of the relationship between
Homeric studies and archaeological research and then feature a survey
of the archaeological evidence that currently informs our understanding
of the Bronze Age and Archaic period depicted in the Iliad. Our
attention will then shift to a consideration of Homeric poetry, especially
as it appears in Venetus A, a 10th century manuscript of the Iliad,
in the formation of the academic discipline of philology in the late 18th
century. Our work that day will conclude with a look at the place of philology
among other more recent interpretative approaches.
The third day will begin with a look at responses to the Iliad
first from the perspective of performance genres, such as lyric poetry
and tragedy, that evolved after the disappearance of the oral tradition
and then through an examination of literary epic as reflected in the works
of Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius. Our focus will
then shift to a general conversation about translation and a comparative
study of the English versions that are widely available today, such as
those by Chapman, Pope, Butler, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Lombardo.
The fourth day will feature a discussion of the Iliad as a source
of exempla, vignettes that served to illustrate moral dilemmas,
appropriate and inappropriate modes of social interaction, and the relationship
between certain characters and other elements of their immediate and more
distant circumstances. We will look at how these exempla have
migrated into other artistic media including film. Participants will also
have an opportunity to learn about and consider a variety of classroom
approaches to the poem.
This seminar is designed primarily for non-specialists. Faculty members
from all disciplines who might have occasion to use the Homeric Iliad
in their courses may be considered for nomination. Materials for the workshop
will be available in electronic and printed formats in advance of the
seminar. Participants will be asked to read a core subset of the materials
before our work in Washington begins and then, once the seminar is underway,
to contribute their ideas, energy, experience, and skills to creating
modules for use in different academic settings.
Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature
and professor of Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
at Harvard University. He has served as chair of Harvard’s Literature
Concentration, chair of the Department of the Classics, president of the
American Philological Association, and, since 2000, director of the Center
for Hellenic Studies. His publications include The Best of the Achaeans:
Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, winner of the APA’s
Goodwin Award of Merit; Greek Mythology and Poetics; Pindar's
Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past; Poetry as Performance:
Homer and Beyond; Homeric Questions, Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's
Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens;
and Homeric Responses. In the spring of 2002, Professor Nagy
delivered the Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley
on “Homer the Classic.”
Kenneth Scott Morrell is associate professor and chair of Greek and Roman
Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee and is currently the director
of outreach at the Center for Hellenic Studies. In addition to publishing
and teaching on ancient Greek and Latin literature, he
has participated in an archaeological survey in southwestern Turkey and
been active in a variety of initiatives related to the use of information
technology. He was an original member of the Perseus Project and has more
recently been involved with Sunoikisis (www.sunoikisis.org)
and the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology (CGMA) Project
(cgma.depauw.edu).
2006 Ancient Greece Seminar
Brochure and Nomination Form 
(This is a PDF file. In order to view properly, the
minimum software requirement is version 4.0. Adobe Acrobat is available
for free from the Adobe
Web site.)
Click here
for other resources found at the Center for Hellenic Studies
website.
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