Homer Whole: A Reading of the Iliad

ISBN-13: 9780988334328 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 192 str.

Eric Larsen

Opis

The Iliad is one of the most misinterpreted--and thereby maligned--books evercomposed, recited, or written. Eric Larsen's Homer Whole sets out to correct this misreadingof the great epic, to move it out of the caves of primitivism current readersconsign it to and raise it to its proper place as the central foundational work of modernliterary art.Generalizations like "Homer glorifies war," "Homer's highest value is violence," or"honor in Homer is gained only through pillage, slaughter, and war" are heard toooften to be suffered easily, and they are also incorrect, being half-truths no less falsethan "girls are bad at math" or "Frenchmen are arrogant."Reading the Iliad with an open rather than a pre-judging or pre-selecting mind--thatis, reading it "whole"--brings to light psychological elements, philosophic dimensions, emotional nuances, and myriad dramatic subtleties that remain forever locked in darknessfor those who assume, believe, or have been taught that the poem is "primitive," that itcomes from "an age of barbarism," extoling only pillage, greed, and violence.The Iliad has in it much blood, gore, suffering, and death; but it also, in Blake's greatphrase, holds much "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love." To emphasize one side of the poemover the other; to assume one to be "good" and the other "bad"; one "barbaric" and theother "civilized"--this is to read the Iliad with one eye closed and the poem reduced toone-dimensionality, the poem's aesthetic, emotional, and philosophical textures anddepths--the essence of its modernity--unseen and unknown.Homer Whole describes and elucidates the real reasons why the Iliad has survived as theseminal classic that it is, reasons unknown to most readers, both inside academia and out.