TIME AND TEMPO IN HOMER AND SAPPHO

This seminar sets Homer's Iliad and Sappho's lyric poems in relation to each other around topics involving time – including narrative time, beginnings and endings, timeliness, and temporality, as well as rhythm and tempo, syncopation, bodily timing and performance, and chronotopic dynamics. It proposes to think as well about textual time, meaning both how different genres orchestrate time and tempo but also how these authors are treated in ancient and modern reception. We will read theoretical studies of time and temporality, the event, and periodicity, as well as those more focused on genre and occasional performance. Discussions will center around close attendance on specific images and dynamics in the ancient texts, as well as the ways in which theoretical frames may illuminate these. Thus, for instance, seminars juxtapose the epic punctuation of bodies in space with Sappho's female lovers on the move, with scholarly readings deployed to critique the epic-lyric divide around these dynamics. A central and recurrent figure in this scheme is Helen, who is presented in Homeric epic as the central catalyst for the violent unfolding of events (i.e., the Trojan War) and who functions in lyric poetry as a cathexis for the violent consequences of desire.