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Introduction
- University of Texas Press
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1 This book is a study of the full range of techniques for presenting speech in the Homeric epics, something that has been assumed not to exist in Homeric poetry.¹ A range of speech presentation strategies² can indeed be found in Homeric poetry, and they are well worth our attention. If there is such a thing, this fact alone changes our understanding of Homeric narrative in a basic and significant way. Moreover, individual pieces of this overall approach to presenting speech do not fully make sense if they are studied in isolation from other parts of the system. The main conclusion of this book is that each speech presentation technique has a stable set of functions and effects, and that these individual techniques add up to a unified, consistent speech presentation spectrum that underlies the entirety of both poems at all narrative levels. Different kinds of narrators use varied but overlapping subsets of this spectrum;³ a given speech presentation technique does not have one function or effect for a particular narrator or type of speech or narrative context, and a different function in a different context. Such a unified speech presentation spectrum gives a new kind of unity to the poems, which we must take into account in order to understand their power and effect as narratives. This study draws mainly on two bodies of theory for its approach to speech presentation, namely narratology and pragmatics. Narratology, a branch of literary theory concerned with how stories are constructed and told, has developed widely used terminology for describing speech presentation . However, there are important aspects of Homeric speech presentation that narratology cannot explain. For example, whether a given speech is part of a conversation, and where it falls in a conversational exchange, affects how the speech is presented. So does what the speech is trying to do (or, in other words, the speech act type). Directives are presented in a much greater variety of ways than questions or emotional exclamations like vaunts or laments, but the speech presentation typology developed by INTRODUCTION SPEECH PRESENTATION in HOMERIC EPIC 2 narratology does not address this aspect of Homeric speech presentation. To complement narratological approaches to speech presentation, we must turn to ideas developed by subfields of linguistics. In addition to speech act theory, we need pragmatics, and in particular, the notion of the “move” of a speech, which relates various features of an utterance to its position within a conversation. Finally, expressivity, or the features of an utterance that mark it as the speech of an individual with feelings about what he or she has said, can explain why some speeches are presented with direct quotation and others, apparently identical in content and function, are presented differently. This study draws on consensus ideas of these different concepts developed within the individual disciplines from which each has emerged, and uses them in new combinations to shed light both on Homeric speech presentation and on each other. This approach to speech presentation has several benefits. It provides a more well-rounded view of individual speech presentation techniques than we get from studying each one in isolation. Some techniques that have been almost completely neglected, like speech mention, can be understood for the first time as positive contributors to the narrative texture of the poems and not simply fallback mechanisms for times when the “default” presentation technique of direct quotation is not needed. Conversely, we gain a much richer appreciation of what direct quotation brings to the poems if we see it not simply as the default option for presenting speech, but against the larger background of what the other ways of presenting speech contribute to the narrative texture of the poems. Moreover, if both narratology and linguistics are combined into one set of interpretive tools for studying speech presentation, Homeric speech presentation takes on a qualitatively different and more compelling force as a way of understanding the poems. Not only does speech presentation make more sense with this interdisciplinary approach than if either narratology or pragmatics is used alone, but individual speeches themselves yield new insights when we look at them as human speech that can be understood along the same lines as the recorded speech of contemporary speakers that pragmatics uses for its inquiries. If the Homeric epics present speech partly according to pragmatic features that characterize “real” spoken speech, the speech in the poems is implicitly brought closer...