EAN: 9780226675893

HOMER - JAMES I PORTER GEBUNDEN

This is a book about Homer-who probably never existed but nonetheless survives as one of the
most important authors in Western literature. Homer  like Shakespeare  has never ceased to be
an object of fascination. Surely the greatest attraction to Homer lies not in his greatness as
an author but in his utter mystery. Was there really a man  an author named Homer? In this
corner are those who think that there was and that there existed Ur texts of The Iliad and The
Odyssey. On the other side are those who view the blind Homer as an icon  a legend created and
circulated in later centuries when values of authorship were finally codified. As one of the
foremost Homerists  James Porter is uniquely qualified to write about these issues. It is
important to stress that his book is not a reception study of the poetry of Homer. Rather  it
is written for a broad array of general readers  scholars  and cultural pundits  and it
explores the cultural value and  in a narrower sense  the history of a particular value in our
culture (represented by Homer). Porter sees this value as a particular fascination and an
uncertain cipher around which questions of meaning and identity come to be constructed. Porter
suspects that with Homer the ancients and moderns have made a rather telling choice of object
for contention  one that ceaselessly authorizes the imaginative work of culture--

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