Document Type
Article (Journal or Newsletter)
Scholarship Type
Faculty Scholarship
Publication Date
6-9-2026
Abstract
In two separate, timely books Bozzone and Christensen draw from a wide range of scientific disciplines and modern parallels to consider how Homeric language and epic stories are in some ways living and alive. For Bozzone, who analyses the various formal features of Homer’s poetic technique by incorporating cognitive and linguistic frameworks, Homeric language is ‘living’ insofar as it operates on mechanisms analogous to those a speaker uses for natural languages and other kinds of speaking performances. Christensen, on the other hand, applies a series of biological analogies to epic poetry and imagines that the narrative of Homeric epic is ‘alive’ like an actual organism, since it can grow and adapt on its own beyond the design of its creators. In what follows I will review each book on its own terms before bringing them into conversation with each other to reflect on their different contributions.
Bozzone’s Homer’s Living Language offers an important reassessment of the complex ‘machinery’ involved in the production of Homeric poetry. She situates Homer within the oral tradition and argues that formularity, metre and dialect are ‘adaptive technologies’ that ‘serve to enable Homer’s particular kind of improvisational creativity’ (p. 223). These formal features are accordingly recast from poetic constraints to integral supports for the demands and art of oral composition in performance. They variously help to reduce the poet’s overall cognitive load by scaffolding his memory or limiting his creative choices and facilitate his performance identity and genius through conscious or unconscious processes. Each poetic feature receives extensive, independent treatment in the first three chapters. The fourth and final chapter weaves them all into a comprehensive model of Homeric compositional practice, conceived as a system finely tuned for oral performance.
Additional Affiliated Department, Center or Institute
Classics
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Kim, Eunice, "The Technology of Tradition and Biology of Narrative: New Analogies for the Study of Homer and Epic" (2026). Open Access Fund Publications. 31.
https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/oa-fund/31