While many have written on the fragment of Stesichorus's Palinode presented to us in the Phaedrus, most of this work has focused on attempting to understand the function the palinode may have played within Stesichorus's work or his performance tradition, and on the nature of Stesichorus's offense against Helen, the offense which prompted her blinding of him and his subsequent creation of the Palinode fragment itself. Careful examination shows that the language it uses is carefully chosen to situate Stesichorus's work in opposition to epic and Panhellenic versions of the story of Helen.
BLINDNESS AND LITERACY IN THE LIVES OF HOMER ALEXANDER BEECROFT 8 A reasonable objection at this point would be the (well-documented) cases of John Milton, James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, among others, whose blindness in no way prevented the continued composition of highly literate and highly text-based literature and, in Borges's case, did not prevent him from assuming the directorship of the National Library. Such literary activity presumes, of course, a considerable infrastructure of already existing textual literature, and a system of readers and/or amanuenses (Milton's daughter and friends; Joyce's friends including Samuel Beckett; Borges's mother) to accomplish the transfer from textual to oral in both directions; and abundant evidence testifies to the laborious nature of such proceedings. Our Lives of Homer, when they insist on Homer's blindness, have serious reservations about transcription as a legitimate mechanism for the transmission of verbal art. 9 All citations from the Lives will be given with page numbers from Allen's OCT edition. 10 M.R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore, 1981), 23; G. Gigante, Vite di Omero (Naples, 1981), 21. 11 See e.g. Lord (n. 2) on a poem performed by Avdo Međedović which ran to 12,000 lines, approximately the length of the Odyssey. Significantly, this poem, 'The wedding of Smailagić Medo', was learned by Avdo by listening to a recital from a printed songbook version, which was only one-sixth the length of the poem Avdo himself would later perform.
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In this book, Alexander Beecroft explores how the earliest poetry in Greece (Homeric epic and lyric) and China (the Canon of Songs) evolved from being local, oral, and anonymous to being textualised, interpreted, and circulated over increasingly wider areas. Beecroft re-examines representations of authorship as found in poetic biographies such as Lives of Homer and the Zuozhuan, and in the works of other philosophical and historical authors like Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Confucius, and Sima Qian. Many of these anecdotes and narratives have long been rejected as spurious or motivated by naïve biographical criticism. Beecroft argues that these texts effectively negotiated the tensions between local and pan-cultural audiences. The figure of the author thus served as a catalyst to a sense of shared cultural identity in both the Greek and Chinese worlds. It also facilitated the emergence of both cultures as the bases for cosmopolitan world orders.
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