by James Bradley Wells
In Pindar’s Verbal Art, James Bradley Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. This is the first study of Pindar’s language that applies performance as a method for the ethnographic description and interpretation of entextualized records of verbal art. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, Pindar’s Verbal Art is a sociological stylistics of epinician language and demonstrates that Pindar’s is a highly dialogical form of art, an intertextual web of voices, whose study enables us to appreciate popular dimensions of his songs. Wells offers a new take on recurrent Pindaric questions: genre, the unity of the victory song, tradition, and, principally, epinician performance.
James Bradley Wells is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Hamilton College.Acknowledgments
Introduction. Philology as Perspective on the Interaction of Language and Social Life
1. Text and Sign
2. Epinikion as Event
3. Ways of Epinician Speaking I
4. Ways of Epinician Speaking II
5. Novelistic Features of Epinician Style
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Readers interested in this work may also like to read:
- Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The lyric possession of an epic past
- Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and Homeric Style,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41
- Gregory Nagy, Masterpieces of Metonymy: From Ancient Greek Times to Now
- Sarah Hitch, King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad
- Rosaria Vignolo Munson, Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians
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