Author : James Bradley Wells
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 630 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 ( download)
Book Synopsis "Singers Heed the Signs" by : James Bradley Wells
Download or read book "Singers Heed the Signs" written by James Bradley Wells and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Greek poet Pindar (518--446 BCE) composed choral songs celebrating the victories of athletes competing in games held during the Panhellenic religious festivals at the sites of Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea. While there are numerous hypothetical reconstructions for the performance of Pindar's victory songs, "Singers Heed the Signs" is the first study of Pindar's language and the meaning of his songs that applies the performance method as understood in linguistic anthropology. This dissertation is, in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, a sociological stylistics of Pindar's language and offers a new take on recurrent problems in Pindaric scholarship: genre, the unity of the victory song, tradition, and epinician performance. The main theses this dissertation explores are: Pindar's texts record a linguistic medium intended for oral production and aural reception (Chapter 1); each victory song sets up an interpretive frame that enables us to analyze it as a speech event---i.e. a performance (Chapter 2); each epinician song comprises other simpler genres or speech styles (the victory announcement, gnomic statements, lyric utterances, prayers, and mythological narratives) that blend together to give the art form a highly intertextual quality (Chapter 3); Pindar's victory song has the stylistic features that Mikhail Bakhtin attributes to the novel: stylistic diversity and parody (Chapter 4). These theses inform the overall position advanced: rather than being categorically written, elite, and exclusive, the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience as well and served exclusive interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter.