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Plot and Point of View in the Iliad argues that Homer, the poet of the Iliad, may be fully distinguished from the narrator of Homeric poetry, who is the Muse, and also from the heroes and heroines who live within the world of the story. The Iliad is a poem with a particularly rich and complex structure of perspectives, and as point of view as an element of storytelling has garnered tremendous interest in this century, critical attention has taken up this question in relation to Homer's poem. Robert Rabel argues that in different ways, both the Muse-narrator and the poet manipulate point of view in order to discover and define the meaning of the Iliad, placing various ways of thinking in competing and complementary relationships with one another. In the process, the Muse-narrator produces a sophisticated and compelling analysis of the tragic limitations of life in accordance with the heroic ethic. In the end, the poet provides a demonstration of the extent to which reality can only be grasped and apprehended in epic poetry through images that are constructed from various individual perspectives. This volume will be of interest to students of comparative and classical literature, philosophers, and readers of Homeric epic. All Greek passages are translated, and discussions of technical language are kept to a minimum.
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Rabel (Univ. of Kentucky) argues that, in chapters 3 and 24 of the Poetics, Aristotle suggests a way of looking at The Iliad, a way not previously noticed by modern scholars in their discussion of narrative and point of view in the epic. Eric Auerbach writes in Mimesis (Eng. trans., 1953), for instance, that Homeric narrative "makes no use of perspective"; in The Dialogic Imagination (CH, Jul'81), M.M. Bakhtin states that epic contains one "unitary and singular belief system." (Rabel cites, among others, M. Parry, A. Parry, and M. Bowra as arguing in favor of presenting "one unitary Aristotle.") On the other hand, Aristotle discusses Homer a number of times in the Poetics, most specifically in chapters 3 and 24. In a book-by-book discussion of Homer's Iliad--and taking Aristotle's Poetics for his source--Rabel argues compellingly that in The Iliad Homer offers his reader a multiple perspective, that both the narrator and the poet "manipulate point of view in order to discover and define the meaning" of The Iliad. To do this, Homer produces an analysis of the tragic limitations "of life in accordance with the heroic ethic." In addition, he produces a prevailing ironic vision, "which even calls into question the narrator's point of view on the meaning of the story," providing an example of the various individual perspectives. Recommended for graduate and research libraries only. A. F. Erlebach Michigan Technological University