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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
The proposition is a simple as the first verse of Genesis, and marginally more believable: in the beginning, Homer invented literature. He did so - if, that is, he was a single person - dualistically, in two poems that look ahead to different literary futures. The Iliad is our primordial epic, celebrating heroic violence and the glory of combat. The Odyssey, which begins when the war in Troy is over and follows its wily, wayward protagonist on his journey home to Ithaca, begets the alternative genre of romance, a form not end-stopped by death like the epic but open to accident and adventure, free to go on exploring indefinitely. Writers ever since have added footnotes to Homer, whether cynically summarising the Trojan War as a lecherous farce, like Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, or cramming Odyseus's decade-long tour of the Mediterranean into a single day in Dublin, as Joyce did in Ulyssses.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Singing it Anew : David Malouf's Ransom
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-12) 'In 2009 David Malouf's Ransom was published to great critical and popular acclaim. Ransom presents itself very simply as a beautiful story about (among other things) loss, love, vulnerability and storytelling. But what does it mean to talk about the beautiful in writing? Etienne Gilson argues that writing is a making before it is a knowing or willing, so its primary concern is not a truth to be known or a good to be willed. Its primary concern is beauty. This paper explores how the beautiful operates in, and structures, Ransom.' (Author's abstract)
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Proximate Reading : Australian Literature in Transnational Reading Frameworks
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2010; Ken Gelder introduces the concept of proximate reading as: ‘a way of thinking about reading practices broadly speaking, but in particular, a way of conceptualizing reading and literary writing in contemporary transnational frameworks. Proximate reading opens up a number of aspects of reading and literary practice that are to do with the way readers negotiate place, position and what can be called literary sociality (that is, relations between readers, texts and the meanings that bind these relations together), where these things are understood and evaluated in terms of degrees of closeness and/or distance, that is, proximity.' (1)
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Proximate Reading : Australian Literature in Transnational Reading Frameworks
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2010; Ken Gelder introduces the concept of proximate reading as: ‘a way of thinking about reading practices broadly speaking, but in particular, a way of conceptualizing reading and literary writing in contemporary transnational frameworks. Proximate reading opens up a number of aspects of reading and literary practice that are to do with the way readers negotiate place, position and what can be called literary sociality (that is, relations between readers, texts and the meanings that bind these relations together), where these things are understood and evaluated in terms of degrees of closeness and/or distance, that is, proximity.' (1) -
Singing it Anew : David Malouf's Ransom
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-12) 'In 2009 David Malouf's Ransom was published to great critical and popular acclaim. Ransom presents itself very simply as a beautiful story about (among other things) loss, love, vulnerability and storytelling. But what does it mean to talk about the beautiful in writing? Etienne Gilson argues that writing is a making before it is a knowing or willing, so its primary concern is not a truth to be known or a good to be willed. Its primary concern is beauty. This paper explores how the beautiful operates in, and structures, Ransom.' (Author's abstract)
Last amended 4 Jun 2009 09:13:02
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