In this paper I aim to test a general interpretation of television series as narrative epics, in the sense defined by Aristotle’s Poetics and canonised by Renaissance literary theorists.

The Epic of Evolution is a course taught at Northern Arizona University. It engages the task of formulating a new epic myth that is based on the physical, natural, social, and cultural sciences. It aims to serve the need of providing meaning for human living in the vast and complex universe that the sciences now depict for us. It is an interdisciplinary effort in an academic setting that is often divided by specializations; it focuses on values in a (...) climate of relativism; and it concentrates on an enterprise for which there are few textbooks at hand. The course is presented in three segments: the cosmos before humans appeared, the human phenomenon, and scenarios for the future of evolution. (shrink)

Epic Tales from Ancient India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art. Edited by Marika Sardar. San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2016. Pp. 164. $45. [Distr. by Yale Univ. Press.].

Resumen El artículo se centra en el poema Seudoaraucana de Elvira Hernández (2010; 2017) a partir de la reescritura como recurso articulador de una mirada descentrada y amplificada del texto fuente, La Araucana de Ercilla y Zúñiga. Como hipótesis se plantea que la reescritura discute fenómenos sociales vinculados con las fisuras de la nación chilena y los procesos políticos de la actual coyuntura. Como objetivo, se busca establecer un diálogo con la tradición y el campo literario en torno a la (...) épica, por un lado, y con las reconsideraciones críticas acerca de la imaginación poética de la historia, por otro. Abstract The article focuses on the poem Seudoaraucana by Elvira Hernández (2010; 2017) based on the rewriting as an articulating resource of an off-center and amplified look at the source text, La Araucana de Ercilla y Zúñiga. As a hypothesis, it proposes that the rewriting discusses social phenomena linked to the fissures of the Chilean nation and the political processes of the current situation. As an objective, it tries to establish a dialogue with the tradition and the literary field around the epic, on the one hand, and with critical reconsiderations about the poetic imagination of history, on the other. (shrink)

This collection of essays sheds new light on the relationship between two of the main drivers of intellectual discourse in ancient Greece: the epic tradition and the Sophists. The contributors show how throughout antiquity the epic tradition proved a flexible instrument to navigate new political, cultural, and philosophical contexts. The Sophists, both in the Classical and the Imperial age, continuously reconfigured the value of epic poetry according to the circumstances: using epic myths allowed the Sophists to (...) present themselves as the heirs of traditional education, but at the same time this tradition was reshaped to encapsulate new questions that were central to the Sophists' intellectual agenda. This volume is structured chronologically, encompassing the ancient world from the Classical Age through the first two centuries AD. The first chapters, on the First Sophistic, discuss pivotal works such as Gorgias' Encomium of Helen and Apology of Palamedes, Alcidamas' Odysseus or Against the Treachery of Palamedes, and Antisthenes' pair of speeches Ajax and Odysseus, as well as a range of passages from Plato and other authors. The volume then moves on to discuss some of the major works of literature from the Second Sophistic dealing with the epic tradition. These include Lucian's Judgement of the Goddesses and Dio Chrysostom's orations 11 and 20, as well as Philostratus' Heroicus and Imagines. (shrink)

The Green Revolution is often seen as epitomising the dawn of scientific and technological advancement and modernity in the agricultural sector across developing countries, a process that unfolded from the 1940s through to the 1980s. Despite the time that has elapsed, this episode of the past continues to resonate today, and still shapes the institutions and practices of agricultural science and technology. In Brazil, China, and India, narratives of science-led agricultural transformations portray that period in glorifying terms—entailing pressing national imperatives, (...) unprecedented achievements, and heroic individuals or organizations. These “epic narratives” draw on the past to produce meaning and empower the actors that deploy them. Epic narratives are reproduced over time and perpetuate a conviction about the heroic power of science and technology in agricultural development. By crafting history and cultivating a sense of scientific nationalism, exceptionalism, and heritage, these epic narratives sustain power-knowledge relations in agricultural science and technology, which are underpinned by a hegemonic modernization paradigm. Unravelling the processes of assemblage and reproduction of epic narratives helps us make sense of how science and technology actors draw on their subjective representations of the past to assert their position in the field at present. This includes making claims about their credentials to envision and deliver sustainable solutions for agriculture into the future. (shrink)

The epic, one of the oldest forms of poetic expression, came into being and evolved in time immemorial, long before the appearance of writing - the advent of which, while helping to fix oral traditions since the dawn of history, has at the same time sapped these traditions of their freshness. Not until methods of recording and reproduction were perfected was the oral epic restored to its full compass as a work of enduring dimensions.

The history of Milton's reception in Poland suggests that he was mainly seen as a model practitioner of epic poetry, rather than as a political or religious thinker. This conclusion is borne out by comparing two of the three complete translations of Paradise Lost into Polish—the first by Jacek Przybylski (1791), the second by Władysław Bartkiewicz (1902) (the third being Maciej Słomczyński's 1974 translation). The examination of a few crucial passages demonstrates that the earlier translation, Przybylski's, is more successful (...) in representing Milton's linguistic sophistication, theology, and attitude to the Roman Church, than Bartkiewicz's later translation, which, characterized above all by a concern with Catholic correctness, includes many omissions and distortions. Słomczyński's translation, criticized for its theological inaccuracies, is only briefly discussed, as are a few fragments of Milton's work that were translated by other Polish poets. (shrink)

This article examines the conflicting representations of plasticity and epigenetics in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou and evolutionary theorists Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Eva Jablonka. In order to speak of a new biological ‘paradigm’ and to attribute values of novelty or inventiveness to life itself, Malabou has to suppress the unsettled debates within the life sciences. The aporias of evolutionary narrative and causality reveal a necessary differentiality and textuality that belongs neither to life nor science itself, but leaves a (...) haunting remanence within every corpus. New materialism resists this necessity of life-science, which calls for a deconstructive reading. (shrink)

An Epic of Technical Supremacy: Works and Words of Medieval Chinese Textile Technology. By Dieter Kuhn. Riggisberg (Switzerland): Abegg-Stiftung, 2022. Pp. 488. CHF 120.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epic and Tragic Music: The Union of the Arts in the Eighteenth CenturyJoshua BillingsI. The Union of the Arts in WeimarAround 1800 in Weimar, thought on Greek tragedy crystallized around the union of speech, music, and gesture—what Wagner would later call the Gesamtkunstwerk. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottfried Herder both found something lacking in modern spoken theater in comparison with ancient tragedy’s synthesis of the arts. Schiller’s 1803 (...) “Trauerspiel mit Chören,” Die Braut von Messina, represents a radical experiment in recreating the ancient union of the arts.1 The Greek tragic chorus, revived in Schiller’s drama, becomes the modern locus for this union. In a preface appended to the published version of the play, Schiller writes,The tragic work of poetry first becomes a whole through its theatrical performance: the poet only gives the words; music and dance must be added as well to enliven them. As long as the chorus lacks this powerful sensory accompaniment, so long will it appear in the economy of a tragedy as an alien element, a foreign body, a retardation.2 [End Page 99]Exactly contemporary (and possibly in response), Herder’s discussion of drama in his journal Adrastea similarly views the union of the arts in ancient tragedy as a corrective for modern drama:3A Greek who attended our tragedy [Trauerspiel], used to the musical voice of his own, would have to find in it a sad play [trauriges Spiel]. “How wordy-mute,” he would say, “how dull and soundless! Have I stepped into a decorated grave? You shout and sigh and bluster! Move your arms, strain your facial features, reason, declaim; but does your voice and feeling never become song? Do you not miss the strength of this demonic expression? Do your rhythms, your iambs never urge you on to the accents of the true language of the gods?”4The focus on media distinguishes these Weimar discussions of tragedy both from the Jena aesthetics of the Schlegel brothers and from the Idealist “philosophy of the tragic” already underway in the works of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel.5 Though both Schiller and Herder are relatively indifferent to dance, their writings reflect strong interests in music.6 Their considerations [End Page 100] of tragedy show a close engagement with the sensory experience of drama that is unusual for its time, and has little precedent in Germany.For Schiller’s late poetics, the union of words, music, and gesture is a means of radically dividing the experience of theater from daily life. The tragic chorus “should be for us a living wall, which tragedy sets up around itself in order to close itself off wholly from the real world.”7 It “justifies the tragic poet in this raising of tone, which fills the ear, which strains the spirit, which broadens the whole mind.”8 Musical speech, Schiller argues, allows for an expression that transcends conventional language and quotidian existence. Schiller had hoped “to let [the choral intermezzos] be recited in the way of song and to accompany them with an instrument,” though his wish went unfulfilled in the first, and subsequent performances.9 Yet even after relinquishing the real possibility of a union of the arts in performances of Braut, Schiller upheld it as an ideal in his preface.Herder is remembered today primarily for his elaboration of an organic historicism, which understands cultural phenomena according to the circumstances of their creation. Yet his concern was more than merely historical; especially in the Adrastea, he continually sought guidance for the present in the events of the past. A contemporary, writing shortly after Herder’s death, saw the two orientations, historical and critical, as equally important: investigation of the past was intended as “a didactic or warning image” for his own time.10 The guiding idea of the journal was similarly educative, based on Herder’s understanding of Adrastea as a principle of justice and moderation.11 In Herder’s thought, as in most writing on ancient literature of the eighteenth century, there is no absolute division between scholarly and critical concerns: the study of ancient works was both an end in itself and a... (shrink)

I will next briefly enumerate the evidence for the separate poems, beginning with the Trojan series.

Sexual competition in the epics is looked at for examples of conflict between older or more powerful males and younger or subordinate males over fertile females, a pattern that would have characterized the human environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA). In the Iliad and Odyssey, the Old Testament, the Arthurian Cycle (and its Celtic originals), the Volsunga Saga, and El Cid, this pattern is found to be the frame or prime mover or a central feature of the narrative. It is suggested (...) that changes through time in the literary treatment of the theme reflect a progressive dilution of the traditional power of older males over mate choice. (shrink)

Enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle. Upon scanty quotations and a jejune epitome a tedious literature has been built. The older writers, such as Welcker, tried to ‘reconstruct’—as profitable and satisfying a task as inferring a burnt manor-house from its cellars; later scholars have gone out in tracing the tradition of the poems through the learned age of Greece—a scaffolding without ties, by which this or that conclusion is reached according to temperamental disposition to (...) this or that fallacy. I do not intend to enter more than is needful into a controversy where so far as I can see everyone has gone beyond the evidence. If I add to the bulk of the literature, it is in the hope of putting things in their proper places and of presenting the data as they appear to a future editor. (shrink)

This article sketches what is required of a world picture (religious or nonreligious) that is intended to provide orientation in the world for ongoing human life today. How do we move from conceptions and theories prominent in the modern sciences—such as cosmic and biological evolution—to an overall picture or cosmology which can orient us for the effective address of today's deepest human problems? A biohistoricalconception of the human is proposed in answer to this question.

The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature, but when they were produced is not known with certainty. Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works. Our analysis compared a common set of vocabulary items among the three pairs of languages, recording for each item whether the words in the two languages were cognate – derived from (...) a shared ancestral word – or not. We then used a likelihood-based Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the most probable times in years separating these languages given the percentage of words they shared, combined with knowledge of the rates at which different words change. Our date for the epics is in close agreement with historians' and classicists' beliefs derived from historical and archaeological sources. (shrink)

The myths and tales relative to the Raven are among the most evident cultural elements which unite the peoples of Northeast Asia and those of Northwest America. In Asia as in America, the Raven appears in the role of civilizing hero and also in that of trickster and mythological rascal; moreover, a good number of subjects have a resonance on both sides of the Bering Sea. To identify these subjects, an attentive analysis of the folklore is often necessary, but the (...) results are quite clear. Legends of the Raven are to be found in all the tribes of Kamchatka, of the peninsula of the Chukchees and of Alaska: among the Itelmenes, the Koriaks, and the Chukchees, among the Athabascans of the North, the Eyaks, the Tlingits, the Haïdas, the Tsimshians, the Kwakiutls and other Indians of the northwest coast, and finally among the Eskimos and the Aleuts. These legends create a well-defined folklore region beyond whose limits we find either echoes of the different themes of the Raven (a result of the direct influence of Chukchee folklore or of the Indians of the Northwest) or very primitive tales in which the Raven does not appear as the civilizing hero, and is presented minus his religious-mythological halo primarily in a negative aspect. We find these kinds of stories not only on the periphery of the area of diffusion of the Raven epic but also in other folklore areas, often quite distant. (shrink)

Drawn from sixty years of scholarship, this edited collection is the first volume to collate the most influential modern academic writings on Flavian epic poetry, revised and updated to provide both scholars and students alike with a broad yet comprehensive overview of the field.

This article deals with Calchas’ prophecy and Diomedes’ and Ulysses’ interventions during the mustering of the Greeks at Aulis in Statius’ Achilleid. It will be argued that Calchas and Ulysses embody two different approaches to the generic tensions of the new epic which Statius’ poem represents. Calchas, the old uates of the Homeric tradition, seems unable to fully understand the ‘poetics of illusion’ enacted by Thetis and Achilles in disguise, as is clear from his vision. His point of view (...) is skilfully complemented by Ulysses, who turns out to be the true uates, as well as the perfect leader for Achilles’ rescue. As the only figure who can face the fluid and ambiguous reality of the poem and its literary dynamics as well, Ulysses also stands as a poetic voice himself; through his speech, Statius reflects upon the tensions of his epic and the poetic effort needed to channel the narrative from the peaceful setting of Scyros to the martial horizon of Troy. (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin has gained a reputation of a thinker and literary theorist somehow hostile to poetry, and more specifically to the epic. This view is based on texts, in which Bakhtin creates and develops a conceptual contrast between poetry and the novel (in "Discourse in the Novel") or between epic and the novel (in "Epic and Novel"). However, as I will show, such perceptions of Bakhtin's position are grounded in a misunderstanding of Bakhtin's writing strategy and philosophical (...) approach. Bakhtin often draws such conceptual contrasts as the ones between epic and novel, but does so not in order to characterize pre-given phenomena (in this case, the epic and the novel as two groups of literary works), but to construct a conceptual space which he in turn uses to explicate elements of his philosophy. (shrink)

Le mot « héroïne » en grec apparaît assez tardivement dans la littérature comme dans les inscriptions (début du ve s. av. J.-C). Il s’agit de réévaluer l’apport des épopées homériques à la question de la définition d’un héros au féminin. Jusqu’ici, la problématique historique s’était orientée autour de la question de l’attestation chez Homère de cultes héroïques, phénomène particulièrement florissants au viiie s. av. J.-C., souvent associé à la diffusion des poèmes épiques. Une autre approche consistait à chercher dans (...) l’Iliade et l’Odyssée des traces de cultes rendus à des héros morts ou des preuves de l’existence chez Homère de la catégorie religieuse des demi-dieux. Le problème est ici renversé : partant des caractéristiques du héros homérique, l’objectif est de vérifier l’existence d’un héroïsme au féminin et de souligner les liens entre héroïnes et héros dans les épopées. (shrink)

This is a major study of conceptions of selfhood and personality in Homer and Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. The focus is on the norms of personality in Greek psychology and ethics. Gill argues that the key to understanding Greek thought of this type is to counteract the subjective and individualistic aspects of our own thinking about the person. He defines an "objective-participant" conception of personality, symbolized by the idea of the person as an interlocutor in a series of psychological and (...) ethical dialogues. (shrink)

The author deciphers Nietzsche's most enigmatic work as Zarathustra's epic campaign to save secular culture from degradation in the godless world. In this epic reading, the ostensibly atheistic work turns out to be a profound religious text. This revelation is breathtaking and edifying.

This is a philosophical discussion of cinema’s power to create positive illusions and myths, drawing on Nietzsche, Kracauer, and Deleuze.

I argue that, because God is the author of history and has a purpose for his creation, evolution has a plot and can be analyzed with tools drawn from literary criticism. This necessitates engagement with the “epic of evolution” genre of scientific literature. I survey several prominent versions of the epic and distinguish between a purely naturalistic epic of evolution and a goal‐oriented Christian epic of evolution (CEE). In dealing with CEE, I use the thought of (...) J. R. R. Tolkien, along with Kevin Vanhoozer and Dorothy Sayers, to discuss the ways in which we can theologically legitimate speaking of God as the “author” of evolutionary history. (shrink)

In the recent history, the world seems to have taken notice of Afghanistan once the Soviet army overthrew Hafizollah Amin, who had pronounced himself as the leader of the Communist party “khalq” (people) and as the president of Afghanistan after eliminating his predecessor Noor Mohammad Tarakee, who had come to power through a Soviet-backed coup more than a year earlier in 1977. Amin's horrifying reign in the last months of 1978 was short-lived. It took the Soviets only five months to (...) replace him with the exiled Babrak Karmal, who was the leader of the other Communist party “parcham” (the flag).…. (shrink)

The very name of Bihar, a district in the eastern part of India, evokes images of anarchy, banditry, and disarray. Already traversed by distinct cultural zones - Bhojpuri, Mithila, Magadha, and the tribal zone of Jharkhand - Bihari society is characterized by bloody clan conflict over territorial rights. The doggedness with which the region's protagonists form militias is a perpetual source of front-page news. Pitted against the Brahmans and Bhumihar Rajputs, the large landowners, are the herding and soldier castes such (...) as the livestock-herding Yadavas, the farming Kurmis, and the former saltpeter miners, the Noniyas, whose economic, social, and political growth has given them real power. And although Magadha's rich Buddhist past attracts pilgrims and tourists, and Mithila's beautiful painted murals and villages draw art connoisseurs, Bihar ranks as one of the least safe regions of India. The rate of banditry and other crime reaches surprising levels. (shrink)

The role of the gods in the classical world's epic tradition has long been the subject of controversy. In the first book to discuss the problem of the gods across the entire classical literary tradition, rather than in a few individual works, Professor Feeney draws upon the writings of the ancient critics, and looks in detail at the work of the poets themselves.