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| ancient
originality |
Date:
Tue, 2 Mar 1993
From:
Steven Lowenstam
Subject:
Ancient Originality
I've
been asked for some citations on the ancient concept of "originality,"
the use of traditional material for (minor) new effects. I think of
Aristotle's praise of Euripides for making one significant change in
a line from Aeschylus' Philoctetes but no other ancient examples.
Also, what would be the best modern works to look at?
Date:
Wed, 3 Mar 1993
From:
"David M. Schaps"
Subject:
Re: Ancient originality
For
a discussion of what was original in ancient originality, try G.
Williams, _Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry_ (Oxford, '68),
abridged as _The Nature of Roman Poetry_ (Oxford, '70).
Date:
Wed, 3 Mar 1993
From:
Don Lateiner
Subject:
Re: Ancient Originality
The
ancientest praise of originality I know of is: _Odyssey 12.450ff:
Why tell the story again? I told it yesterday. I just hate telling a
tale well told all over again.
Date:
Wed, 3 Mar 1993
From:
"Jenny S. Clay"
Subject: Re: Ancient Originality
Don,
What about Od. 1. 351-52? "Men celebrate most thesong which is
the latest to circulate." People who talk about Homer and oral
poetry as purely (?) traditional don't talk about this passage.
Date:
Wed, 3 Mar 1993
From:
john foley
Subject:
Re: Ancient Originality
In
response to Jenny Clay's message, I would note that oral poetry is,
in my experience, never "purely" traditional in the sense
I think she means. Living "traditions" are always creating
"new" songs, never out of whole cloth, but many times
representing pretty stark departures from "canonical"
songs. An example (actually dozens of examples) is furnished by that
now-desperate part of the world formerly known as Yugoslavia, where
songs about WWII resistance fighters were "created" as
oral traditional poetry. They have a debt to tradition, of course,
in their phraseology, narrative structure, and story-patterns, but
they are -- perhaps like the type of "creation" referred
to in the _Odyssey_ quotation -- also "new."
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1993
From:
Don Lateiner
Subject:
Re: Ancient Originality
JSC has one upped my ref. to twelve, although very few days separate
(although 12 books keep the reff. apart) Telemakhos at the manse
from Odysseus' stay on Skheria. The oral poetry network ought to
take up these astonishing praises of novelty. Rick Newton is writing
a book on metarnarrative and there is an article by Wm.WYatt on
Homer and Odysseus as story=tellers (poets) in Studi micenei et
analolici_ (I might have that title wrong) ca. vol.27 ( write:
anatolici, sorry). Someone was looking for reff. to torture and
punishment. I believe there were several (two?) volumes from the
French School at Rome on this subject about ten years ago.
Date:
Thu, 4 Mar 1993
From:
Steve Lowenstam
Subject:
Ancient Originality
Again
Thanks to all those who replied to my first inquiry, but could I ask
again for modern bibliography, especially pertaining to Greece? I
don't know if this group has fallen into the same aporia as I did
when I was asked the question. It seems all our work on Greek (and
Latin) literature is underpinned by the knowledge that the Greek
concept of originality differs immensely from our modern view based
on the Romantics, but no obvious bibliography came to my mind. Any
first or second thoughts out there?
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From: Dougal Blyth
Subject:
Re: Ancient Originality
The
Homerists don't have this all to themselves; consider Aristoph.
*Nubes* 546-48 (Parabasis) "oud' (umas zhtw 'xapatan dis kai
tris t'aut' eisagwv all' aei kainas ideas eisferwv sofizomai oudev
allhlaisiv (omoias kai pasas dexias" and context. See also the
agon between the dikaios and adikos logoi, e.g. 894-99: A: alla se
vikw, tov emou kreittw faskovt' eivai. D: ti/ sofov poiwv; A: gvwmas
kaivas exeuriskwv. D: tauta gar av#ei dia toutousi tous avohtous. A:
ouk, alla sofous. Also *Ranae*; firstly vv. 1-11 (in deference to
JSC I shan't quote); but consider the contest of the tragedians.
Compare the use of _exeuriskw_ above with gamous d' avosious
eisferwv eis thv teXvhv (Aisch. of Eur., Ran. 850). See too 954ff.,
where Euripides boasts of novel dramaturgy, using _didaskw_, and 959
oikeia pragmat' eisagwv, (ois Xrwme#', (ois xuvesmev But innovation
is the theme throughout (e.g., compare 973-74 logismov ev#eis thi
teXvhi kai skepsiv; 1004 all' w prwtos twv (Ellhvwv purgwsas (rhmata
semva [chorus of Aisch.]; etc, etc.) A couple of general remarks:
(a) the agon is frequently about cultural innovations, when it pits
old against new, but perhaps in *Ranae* most explicitly about poetic
originality; (b) although Ar. clearly recognises the concept of
novelty, it is intercepted by other terms and interpretations: (i)
the moral effect, and (ii) claims of having more techne (i.e., the
achievements are already in the art, to be released/discovered, not
invented). This of course is the view of Aristotle also, expressed
teleologically in the Poetics. The key to all this, seems to be that
innovation is understood exclusively in the context of a definite
techne, and not as a function of authorial personality. (c) There is
a long tradition among the Greeks, all the same, of tracing previous
cultural development as sequences of artistic and intellectual
innovation by named individuals. See the account of rhetorical
innovations in Plato's Phaedrus, and Aristotle's account of previous
philosophy in Met. A. This led to the kind of doxographies and
histories for which the peripatetics were famous. But note too that
both Plato and Aristotle prefer a cyclical theory of artistic,
cultural, and social development in the final analysis (see e.g.,
Plato's Critias, and the end of Aristotle's Met. Lambda ch.8, and
Pol. VII.9, 1329b25-33). And don't forget Herodotus, who names
innovators.
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From:
David Sider
Subject:
originality
Any
discussion of this should include mention of the literature on the
variation of paradigms to sharpen the point. Wilcock and Gaisser
come to mind (CQ and HSCP, respectively, I think). Wilcock gives as
a prime example Achilles' statement to Priam, when trying to get him
to eat, that even Niobe remembered to eat when mourning her
children, a most unlikely scenario for one mourning to such an
extent that she turned into a dripping stone. Note also Aristotle
Poetics 24.1459b30-31 (talking of the variety to be found in the
many episodes of epic) "Sameness (*homoion) soon satiates and
causes tragedies to "be banished" (*ekpiptein* i.e. fail).
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From:
John Peradotto
Subject:
Re: Originality
hope it's not too fusty of me to suggest that the problem of
originality is a philosophical and linquistic question. Against
convention or tradition or myth it seems to me that originality
realizes itself through what I would call "combinatorial skill"
-- perhaps, better "combinatorial daring," the two of them
best understood as a continuous operation. Merleau-Ponty (Sur la
phenomeno- logie du langage) considers REARRANGEMENT a major mode of
realizing new meaning, of bridging the gap, formed by the inadequacy
of existing signifiers, between intention and communication. The
intention to signify, he says, acquires self-awareness and
embodiment, at one and the same time, in the search for an
equivalent in the system of available signifiers. It is a matter of
realizing a certain arrangement of these already signifying
instruments, which elicits in the listener or reader the inkling of
a new and different signification and inversely accomplishes for the
speaker or writer what Merleau-Ponty calls the "anchorage"
of a meaning unprecedented in already available meanings. It's
obvious how closely the problem of originality is to the problem of
metaphor.
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From:
Robin Mitchell
Subject:
Re: Originality
JP's account of Merleau-Ponty brings to mind the Russian Formalist
concept of "defamiliarization" (or Brecht's
Verfremdungaffekt), wherein the work of art impedes perception so
that one's habitual sleepy experience of the world is upset: "art
exists that one may recover the sensation of life....Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of the object; the object itself is not
important." (Victor Shklovksy) While we're on the subject of
distorting perception, American fans of Prime Suspect would be
shocked to see how much was removed from the British original in
order to satisfy conservative groups; in the process, they destroyed
the last episode, which featured the villain Jason sodomizing his
last victim and, when being arrested finally, repeatedly screaming "Black
Bastard" at his captor as he's hauled off. This sanatized both
the sexual violence and the really strong racial current of the
series. Jason's racism, in the original, is inseparable from his
misogyny. PBS left its viewers with a nice, far less disturbing
ending. In the space of about 10 minutes the British original
confronted its audience with a rapid fire sequence of sexual
violation, racial violence and the sexsim/racism within the London
p.d. as Tennison is passed over for promotion. Americans merely got
a nice morality tale of a middle class woman whose knowledge that
she's more capable than her peers leads her to act too rude
sometimes. What a country!
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From:
James O'Donnell
Subject:
Originality
The
notion of originality is linked to the notion of authorship and to
the idea, that grows stronger over time and even gains the force of
law, that it is possible to claim property rights over ideas and
words on grounds of having originated them. The very fact that those
grand old yarns by somebody or other come equipped with an author's
name ("Homer") and an almost aboriginal sense of the
importance of working out just who that author was seems to me the
first indisputable evidence of this obsession.
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From:
"Jenny S. Clay"
Subject:
Re: Originality
I'm not so sure that originality MUST be related to proprietary
authorship. For example: the proem to the Odyssey almost shouts out
to you that this version is going to be different--but puts the
blame or responsibility for this difference on Ms. Muse. Homer who?
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From:
Don Lateiner
Subject:
Re: Ancient Originality
I
don't know if Lowenstam (it was you, wasn't it) only wanted
information on literary originality, but if more general originality
is under examination, don't forget Kleinguenther's monograph:
_Protos Euretes_ Philologus Supp.26 (Leipzig 1933), a useful
collection reflecting the folkloric inclination to assign all first
to specific persons, living, dead, or never was.
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 1993
From: Don Lateiner
Subject:
Re: originality
Since
Sider brings up "paradigm shifts", perhaps better called
variations on a formula by Homer", I am reminded of 1. N.
Austin on the vagaries of pepnumenos in Odyss. 2. a great example:
Arete instead of saying as usual, "Where do you come from and
what is your name" says "Who are you and where from, and
where did you get those clothes?"
Date:
Sun, 7 Mar 1993
From:
Lowell Edmunds
Subject:
originality
Jack
Peradotto's posting on originality ("combinatorial skills";
"rearrangement" [Merleau-Ponty]) arrived angelically just
as I had finished an article in the CARDOZOLAW REVIEW about how
jurors arrive atdecisions. the authors, cognitive psychologists, are
proponents of "the story model," according to which jurors
make sense of the mass of non- chronological, heterogeneous,
contradictory material that they hear at a trial by shaping it into
a story. The theory holds of course that they already have "story
schemas" that they bring with them and that they use these
schemas to build the new story that will lead to their verdict. An
example, I thought, of rearrangement.
Date:
Sun, 7 Mar 1993
From:
john foley
Subject: Re: originality I
May I add to Lowell Edmunds' and Jack Peradotto's comments on "combina-
torial skills" an entry from a different field? It is Louis O.
Mink's "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," in _The
Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding_, ed.
Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press),
pp. 129-49. John Foley |
| Culled
from
classics.log9303 |
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