What do I need to know about EPIC LITERATURE before I read The Odyssey?

1. What do I need to know about EPIC LITERATURE before I read The Odyssey? As we go through the information in this presentation, please take notes using the Cornell Method.

2. Wait, what are Cornell notes?

3. What is an EPIC poem? • “It is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race.” -Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (2005)

4. Features of the Epic These book-long poems are unlike most other poems we are familiar with, and not just for their length. They are different in that: • their heroes are of national or even cosmic importance, • the setting is ample, and there is a good deal of movement within it, • they are performative, sort of like a play.

5. How do we read an epic? Epic = Drama + Narrative Speeches make up so much of epic poems that Plato called epic poetry a mixture of dramatic and narrative literature. The speeches might be a throwback to the oral tradition of epic, where the epic story was passed down, from master storyteller to pupil, possibly within a family. The storyteller or "rhapsode" played a lyre as he sang his improvised epic song. The epic song was composed of elements from myth and folklore welded into place by means of the rhapsode's skilled insertion of formulaic elements.

6. EPIC Characteristics • The language of epic poetry is often formulaic. Figures of speech: similes (epic similes), epithets, repetition • The material of epic poetry is elevated; it does not dwell on the banal details of life.

7. Epics of Western Literature When we refer to epic poetry in the context of ancient literature, we usually refer to the two Greek poems attributed to Homer (left), and the derivative one in Latin by Virgil (right).

8. Epics of Western Literature • The Iliad (about the role of Achilles in the Trojan War)

9. Epics of Western Literature • The Odyssey(about the misadventures of Odysseus trying to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War)

10. Epics of Western Literature • The Aeneid(about the travails of the Trojan prince Aeneas on his way from the Trojan War to Italy where he founds a new home for the future Romans)

11. (but not JUST Western!)

12. Epic Hero • The central figure of epic poetry is the hero. Epic heroes come from the heroic era, which precedes the Archaic Age in ancient Greece and the founding of Rome by the legendary king Romulus. • Like the heroes of mythology, epic heroes reveal the values and beliefs of their culture.

13. What is the Hero’s Journey? • In his book The Hero with A Thousand Faces, smart person Joseph Campbell asserts that in all heroic literature, there is really only one story. He calls that story the Monomyth. • The Monomyth is a pattern, a template. The individual details may change, but the basic pattern remains intact.

14. Monomyth Cycle

15. Examples of the Monomyth Cycle • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGV1BvnyvGo