[B-Greek] poetry and agency (was Sophocles' Ajax (was "Voice matters again"))
Elizabeth Kline
kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Fri Mar 27 14:57:20 EDT 2009
On Mar 27, 2009, at 4:59 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:
> Beyond that, I rather think that creative literary artists, whether
> poets or novelists or dramatists, or whatever, have discovered
> heretofore and will continue to discover ways in which to frustrate
> the ordinary reader/listener's expectation that the discourse
> attended to will ensue in an orderly sequential narration such as
> that promised by Luke in the opening statement of his gospel. I
> don't think that the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White
> intended or succeeded at telling writers like William Faulkner or
> Sophocles or Ernest Hemingway how they should order the elements in
> their sentences.
Thank you Carl,
The audience who heard these texts in performance might be compared to
hearing a latin Mass, you know what is going to be said in advance, so
a little ellipsis isn't going to cause much confusion.
I am trying to read in blocks, something on the order of a page or two
in the Oxford text of Sophocles. Once I have gone over it lightly then
I go back and try and figure everything out in detail, looking in the
grammars and so forth. This can be a very frustrating experience,
moving from NT Gospels or Epistles to Attic Tragedy produces something
like shell shock. My goal is to understand what is going on well
enough that I can "read it" rather than just decipher it like some
mystical hieroglyphic tomb inscription.
Thanks again,
Elizabeth Kline
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