Lament Ritual Transformed into Literature: Positing Women’s Prayer as Cornerstone in Western Classical Literature

Abstract

Research into the origins of Western classical literature has considered the performance of epic poetry by male performers, but the possibility of women’s participation in the creation of the oral literature that gave rise to the classics has not been adequately investigated. Here I look at the role of women chanters in the creation of spontaneous lament, point to similarities in the structure of the poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, and suggest that these two epics of classical literature may have been based originally on women’s words.

Lament in Jewish Thought

“…Studies of ancient texts (e.g., Bakhtin 1981Bakhtin , 1984Bakhtin , 1986Ricoeur 1974Ricoeur , 1995Svenbro 1993;Weinbaum 2001;Hasan-Rokem 2005;Kolesch 2006) have developed versatile hermeneutics for interpreting experience in its vocal and gestural articulations from written documents, to overcome the obvious discontinuity between the experienced world of the past and the experiential basis of the interpreter in the present time. 17 The interpretation must proceed as a series of attentive acts of watching and listening directed toward performers moving on the inwardly projected ruins of the past.…”