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The story concerns the victimization of the Greek hero Bellerophon, who incurs the wrath of Proitos’s wife by denying her advances. His refusal so infuriates her that she spitefully reports him to her husband as the instigator, causing Proitos to attempt a kind of vicarious, long-distance revenge (which eventually fails, by the way). In short, Proitos sends Bellerophon to the Lykian king with a “folding tablet” bearing the encoded message to “kill the bearer.” Homer calls the kill-code sêmata lugra, literally “baneful signs,” and it’s hard to argue with that description. But Homer and his tradition, good citizens of the oAgora, weren’t simply defaulting to the tAgora here. The logic runs the other way. By calling the written message a series of signs, Homer was explaining that inscription, a technology he doesn’t use, amounts to a species of sign language, an OT technology that he does use. He is characterizing the momentous communication in the only way that he can—as a species of the expressive signals known within his tradition as sêmata and used to describe such phenomena and objects as divinely inspired omens, tomb markers for heroes, and Odysseus’s and Penelope’s olive-tree bed. And Homer is absolutely consistent in his media dynamics. Wherever these sêmata occur in the Iliad and Odyssey, and for whatever specific purpose, they share one principal function: they serve as symbols rife with hidden meaning that can be discovered in no other way. As such, these dedicated signs (Accuracy) remain as mysterious as they are powerful, as superficially opaque as they are effective. In other words, Homer interprets the tablet and its murderous code from within his own oAgora by comparing the written message to a meaningmaking strategy that lies at the heart of his OT craft. Homer does not struggle to escape the ideology of texts. He does not suffer from the modern plague of agoraphobia. He’s many centuries too early to worry over the reaccreditation of the Museum of Verbal Art. For once, the tables are turned: oral tradition sets the frame of reference, and we’re asked to understand a text in terms of oAgora technology, not vice versa. L Citizenship in Multiple Agoras You know how it goes. You’re planning a trip to another country and find you need a passport, maybe a visa, perhaps even a special travel permit beyond that. Documents in hand, you get off the plane, pass through immigration and customs, change some currency, and—if you’re able—switch to the local language . But even if your vocabulary isn’t spotty, even if your syntax and grammar prove serviceable, you can’t simply assume immediate membership in the new culture. Remembering a few words and stringing correct sentences together is one thing. Achieving cultural fluency (Culture As Network)—which requires Citizenship in Multiple Agoras . 51 a set of habits borne of years of experience and subliminal learning—is quite another, and well beyond your reach. Unless, of course, you’ve learned more than one system. Unless you feel entirely at home and at ease configuring more than one reality. Unless, in short, you’re a full-fledged member of more than one culture (A Foot in Each World). The benefits of agora citizenship To belong to an agora (Agora As Verbal Marketplace) as a citizen in good standing is like belonging to a culture. The marketplace feels native, and you can transact your business fluently—without hesitation and without conscious adjustments and recalculations. YourtItinerary Let’sbeginwithourusualdefaultagora,thetextualmarketplace. You have a report to write? Then your tAgora facility with memos, executive summaries , or whatever form your employer uses, kicks in and you compose within a familiar frame of reference. You have a research paper due in two weeks? Then your text-mastery (Texts and Intertextuality) guides you through the library, through websites loaded with static eFiles,12 through the format preferred by the course instructor, and so forth. Whatever the challenge, the point is that you don’t have to rediscover the most basic aspects of the procedure. You don’t have to relearn the routine. Instead, you enter the tAgora (Arena of the Text) and proceed according to its rules for creating and exchanging text-objects. YoureItinerary It’s becoming easier all the time for many of us to enter and use the eAgora—which explicitly does not mean to consult fixed texts on the web but specifically to engage in...

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