The four-week seminar will be chronologically arranged, from antiquity to the present, with three three-hour sessions per week. Additionally, at the end of each week there will be a theoretical segment on the implications of that week’s subject matter for the overarching issues of classics and canons, cultures of scholarship, and reception and cultural memory. The hope is that by integrating these wider perspectives into each weekly topic rather than setting them up as a stand-alone week-long session, an extra element of continuity will emerge over the course of the month, as either a pattern emerges or a single thread evolves, which will assist participants as they begin to conceptualize their final projects.
Week 1: Homer in Antiquity. Homer was the foundation of all ancient scholarship: theories of grammar, exegesis, allegorical interpretation, philosophical critique, linguistic analysis, and textual criticism all took root in the prestigious soil of the Homeric texts, but above all the Iliad. The Homeric scholia, or grammatical commentaries on Homer that ultimately derive from the Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic era (third to first centuries BCE), give us a more or less direct glimpse of the ancient scholar at work on an ancient text. These will be at the center of the first week of the seminar. We’ll begin by looking at two episodes which are richly documented in the scholia: the opening lines to the Iliad and the scene from Iliad 7 in which the Achaeans suddenly decide, ten years into the Trojan offensive, to build a defensive fortification (the so-called Achaean Wall, a symbolic and metapoetic counterpart to the Trojan Wall), and then the magnificent obliteration of this same wall at the hands of Poseidon and Zeus at the start of Iliad 12. In each case, the commentators discover and then try to solve “problems” (this is their working method), such as, Why did the poet begin his poem with the word wrath?, or, Why was the Achaean Wall built when it was and then destroyed in the spectacular way in which it was?
The first episode contains some of the most densely commentated lines of all Greek poetry. The second opens up the problem of literary fiction in antiquity and announces the theme of obliteration in Homer. It is thus directly tied to the thematics of loss that haunts the epic imagination and the imagination of Homer’s readers in antiquity and in the modern world. From here we will move backward to predecessors of the scholiastic methods of reading, interpretation, and criticism—in Aristotle, Plato, the Certamen (The Contest of Homer and Hesiod), and select Presocratics (Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Theagenes); to the biographical tradition that surrounds Homer and what in modernity has been called “the invention of Homer”; and then to later echoes of all these traditions in later antiquity (in Lucian, Dio, and Philostratus in the second century CE), where the problems of Homer’s possible fictions and even his own fictionality become increasingly merged, even as the issue of his identity is pushed to a most uncomfortable limit (Lucian’s Homer reveals himself, in a comical interview in the Underworld, to be a Babylonian named Tigranes; other late Greeks make him into a Syrian or an Egyptian). The question whether Homer was even Greek, first raised by Meleager (ca. 100 BCE), is one further way in which the Homeric inheritance comes to haunt the European imagination. (Being intimately familiar with Ionia, and suspiciously sympathetic to the Trojans, the poet of the Iliad could easily appear to be an assimilated Easterner, with different effects in different eras.) The nineteenth-century incarnation of this specter was an ugly racialized reading of Homer as a familiarly Dorian and Teutonic in some eyes, or Semitic in others. Its latest avatar is in the Orientalizing tendencies of the latest research at Troy, which looks for Hittite relics in the Iliad.
Primary readings: The Contest of Homer and Hesiod (trans. M. L. West); selections from Presocratics, Plato, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Philostratus (Heroicus); Homeric scholia (including those on Crates and Aristarchus); the Problems and Solutions tradition (Aristotle, Poetics and Aristotelian fragments, sel.); Lives of Homer (trans. West); ps-Heraclitus (sel.); Longinus (sel.).
Secondary readings: West; Graziosi (sel.); Richardson; Lamberton (sel.); Nagy; Podlecki; Bassi; Bowersock (sel.); Finkelberg (sel.); Porter 2004 (sel.); Scodel.
Guest speakers: Prof. Gregory Nagy (Harvard and The Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC); Prof. Richard Janko (Classical Studies, UM)
Week 2: Early Modernity. This week will be devoted to the early modern rediscovery of Homer, which took several forms, mainly skeptical. Giambattista Vico first articulated the view, in his Scienza Nuova Seconda (1730), that Homer was not a person but an idea (un’idea) created by the Greeks (though believed in by them). Vico also anticipated F. A. Wolf’s view, which ushered in a revolution in Homeric scholarship, that Homer was an illiterate bard who belonged to an oral tradition. This is the origin of the modern version of the Homeric Question, which continues to puzzle scholars even today. Vico and Wolf both embody the most typical response to Homer in the modern age: neither unadulterated skepticism nor humanism, but simply—uncertain ambivalence. Voltaire’s pointed criticisms of Homer (1727) are further evidence of the hostility of the age of Enlightenment and a final relic of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.
Vico’s views had to be retrieved by Wolf to make any impact. But it was the British traveler to the Troad, Robert Wood, who sparked off the modern revival of interest in Homer in England and in Germany with his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer in 1769. Wood read Homer by reading the topography, geography, and weather of the Troad. To do so was to take in the empirical reality that Homer had once seen and then “painted” in his poems (evidently, his Homer was not blind). Wood also conducted a kind of Homeric ethnography of modern-day Bedouins, and likewise launched the hypothesis of Homer’s primitive orality, against the excessively learned scholars (“lawyers”). Wolf, the heir to these musings, changed the way Homer would be forevermore treated, with his Prolegomena to Homer, a slyly skeptical, proto-“analytical” tract from 1795 that challenged the thesis that Homer’s poems were overseen by a unitary personality. The age of “Analysis,” of the stratified reading of Homer’s poems according to layers of composition, was ushered in. Philology had conquered Homeric territory, much to the chagrin of the poets, from Schiller and Goethe to Robert Browning (“Development”).
Primary readings: Vico (sel.); Voltaire (sel.); Cyriac of Ancona (sel.); Robert Wood; F. A. Wolf (sel.).
Secondary readings: M. Wood, In Search of Troy; Grafton.
Guest speaker: Prof.Donald Verene (Philosophy, Emory University)
Week 3: Romantic, Victorian, and Bismarckian Eras. During this week the focus will turn to the nineteenth century, as views of Homer oscillated between rationalism and irrationalism in an array of attempts to locate Homer and Homeric society in time and place, on a religious map (especially within the framework of Christian revelation), and in the once-discredited but slowly reviving tendencies of humanism. From Grote and Gladstone to Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde, to the classicists from Cambridge who in the wake of Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) gathered around Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray and devoted themselves to primitive cults and rituals in what was once a polite and classical Greece (the so-called Cambridge Ritualists), the world of Homer cast long, dark shadows on a violent prehistory that was felt to have been more or less purged from the poems but legible in them. One could no longer close one’s eyes to Achilles’ mutilation of Hector’s corpse. Schliemann was something of a litmus test, and he threw the century’s understanding of Homer into crisis. Various issues were in play: a boundary dispute between professionals and amateurs; a contest between disciplines (the study of material culture and physical remains as opposed to the study of literary culture and ideas); a clash between idealism and materialism (the new religion of the nineteenth century); and finally, after so many millennia, a palpable confrontation with the Homeric past. Classicism felt endangered. Nietzsche, at exactly the same time (but unaware of Schliemann), was meanwhile creating havoc of similar sort, by raising the specter of a truly Dark Age, minus the problem of material culture. A raging Dionysus was overtaking the rational, balanced Apollo. Could Homer even be made intelligible to the modern world? The fear or reality that Homer was now un-translatable (Arnold) lay at the core of all these nineteenth-century projects.
Primary readings: Gladstone (sel.); Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” “Homer’s Contest”; The Birth of Tragedy (sel.); Schliemann (sel.); Jebb (essays); F. W. Newman (optional); Arnold, “On Translating Homer,”; Gilbert Murray (sel.).
Secondary readings: Morris; R. Fowler; Marchand; Turner; Porter on Arnold and on Nietzsche; Prins; M. Parry
Week 4: Twentieth Century. It would take the horrors of two world wars for the darker implications of these fin de siècle approaches to be realized more immediately in critical readings of the epics themselves. Three essays composed in the midst of World War II stand out above all, Simone Weil’s The Iliad, Or the Poem of Force (1940-41), Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), and Auerbach’s “Odysseus’ Scar” (1942-45). All three need to be read against the background of the ongoing war and the Fascist takeover in Germany. The last two in particular, written by Jews in exile, offer powerful and unsparingly critical readings of the tradition of German classical philology, which are implicated by their authors in the disasters of the century. In the shadow of these readings, and with the presence of the Nietzschean tradition still strong (thanks in no small part to E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational [1951]), the urge to recover a humanistic Homer during the calmer post-war years must struggle hard (Bernard Williams, Dodds’ student, is a later example). The choice between darkness or light, inhumanity and humanity, is a fraught one. A related topic will be the problem of locating a “Homeric voice” in the prison of traditional formulaic language constructed by modern philology since Wolf (A. Parry’s still seminal article on “The Language of Achilles”).
Primary readings: Auerbach; Weil; Horkheimer and Adorno (sel.); A. Parry; Bernard Williams (sel.).
As mentioned, throughout the four weeks we will continually revisit the following kinds of questions: What does the example of the survival of Homer tell us about adjacent fields of scholarship, historically and today? What role does philology play in the humanities? Is it a paradigm of interpretation? And how has classicism and the need for canons determined the ways in which Homer has been received? It is hoped that questions like these will emerge from the seminar in different inflections and colorations, depending upon the backgrounds and interests of the participants, and that these questions will help steer participants towards their final projects.
Prior to the first meeting I will ask that all participants refresh their familiarity with Homer. I will put together a short list of introductory secondary readings and have these available in PDF form through a University of Michigan library website, where participants will have restricted (authenticated) access to all the materials for the course (readings, syllabus, and web-links). This will also be the location of the summer seminar’s readings, so that anyone who so desires will be able to get a head start on those as well. Some of the pre-assigned readings will give essential background, in brief compass, to the text and transmission of the Homeric text and the status quaestionis of Homeric scholarship (Janko; Haslam; Fowler). There are some key essays from Homer’s Ancient Readers that should be read in advance (Richardson on Aristotle; Grafton on Renaissance readers) and the excellent new Cambridge Companion to Homer (Fowler, ed.), now entering its second printing. And because Homer both raises and begs the question of what is classical, being the paradigm of the classical ideal but also its ruination (arriving too early, appearing too naïve and too primitive to fulfill this ideal), and because Homeric studies generally turn on the problem of classicism, I will ask participants to read my Introduction to Classical Pasts (2005), “What is ‘Classical’ about Classical Antiquity?”
The last-named essay will become the basis for the more wide-ranging readings on canons, the classical ideal, reception, cultures of scholarship, and cultural memory. Readings for these sessions will be drawn from: Gumbrecht; S. H. Humphreys (ed.); Hardwick; Bourdieu; Celenza; Guillory; Porter (“Materiality of Classical Studies”); B. H. Smith; Assmann.