Description
"In this subtle, learned, and daring book, Claude Calame challenges his readers to rethink the very principles of mythmaking in the poetry and art of the ancient Greeks. The first of Calame's books to appear in English translation, The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece subverts common assumptions about the relationships between poet and audience, poet and muse, and poet and mask. Taking as his point of departure the linguistic writings of Emile Benveniste, Calame utilizes the methodology of semiotics in formulating a new way of looking at the poetics of Homer, Hesiod, lyric, tragedy, and even history. He confronts such important questions as the relationship between authorship and authority, the role of the first person in choral lyric poetry, the dichotomy between lyric and epic genres, the literariness of history, the tragic mask as a projection of identity, and the poetics of the gaze in inconographic traditions" --
