Lecture (LEC)

• TOPIC : Homer and the Bible
• Above class meets with CMLT-C 405

Topic: Homer and the Bible (Ancient Mediterranean Literature and the Rise of Interpretation) The activity we know as literary criticism--writing that has as its explicit aim the interpretation of another piece of writing--originated in the Hellenistic era with the elevation to canonical status of two literary corpuses, the Homeric poems and the Tanak or Hebrew Bible. In its earliest form, interpretation was tied to the myth of inspiration; each depended on and enabled the other. In this course, we shall be asking about the factors intrinsic and extrinsic that led to the rise of interpretation in the ancient world, and by extension that motivate it in our own. Much of our time will be devoted to the primary texts. We shall be reading both Iliad and Odyssey, as well as extensive selections from the Bible, with particular attention to the role revisionism, a form of interpretation, played in the genesis of ostensibly ¿original¿ works. To better understand the context and redaction history of both corpuses, we shall also be looking at some of the main trends of modern scholarship and at two ancient Mesopotamian works that influenced them, the Gilgamesh Epic and the Babylonian Creation Epic, each of which has its own complex history of composition. But we shall also be studying examples of early exegesis, including Stoic and neo-Platonic readings of Homer, and such post-biblical genres as rabbinic midrash, Philonic allegory, and the pesher literature of Qumran and the New Testament. Written work: regular critical or exegetical exercises and a final paper. Students are advised to begin reading the Iliad, preferably in the translation of Richmond Lattimore, before the first class.