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Hearing Homer's Song
- The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry
- Gesprochen von: Richard Poe
- Spieldauer: 10 Std. und 1 Min.
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Hearing Homer's Song
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Inhaltsangabe
From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the 20th century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature.
In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before", when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930s, assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, the way we think of most literature; and the "after" that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story - cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of 33.
From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia - where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry - we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of "oral theory," which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.
Kritikerstimmen
“[Kanigel's] biography (the first) of Milman Parry, set in California, Paris, Yugoslavia, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, would translate well to the big screen (or Netflix). Although an ideal beach read for the classics scholar, the book is aimed at the layperson; Kanigel eschews jargon and in-depth technical discussion while still attempting to convey the magnitude of Parry’s theory.” (A. E. Stallings, The American Scholar)
“In his elegant biography.... Kanigel tells this complicated story to the general reader with inspired calm.... Parry’s life story has enough quotidian quirks, and such a crashing, inexplicable finale, that he looms above his own work like a ghost.... [His] is the story of an idea, the Western Idea writ (or sung) large, and Kanigel traces how a devoted, obscure scholar who died in a hotel room at 33 managed to transform our understanding of written and oral traditions.” (Tim Riley, Los Angeles Review of Books)
“One man’s inspired effort to recover Homeric song, not through books and research but lived experience.... Kanigel, a biographer of intellectual pioneers, has captured [its] excitement.” (James Romm, The New York Review of Books)
