Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics

Jonathan L. Ready is a professor of classical studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as numerous articles on Homeric poetry. He is also the co-editor of Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters (University of Texas Press, 2018) with Christos C. Tsagalis and serves as the co-editor of the annual Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (Brill).

• 0: IntroductionPart I: Oral Texts and Oral Intertextuality1: Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric EpicsIntroduction1.1: Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization1.2: Application to the Homeric Epics1.2.1: The Preexistence of Tales and Songs and the Object-Like Status of Utterances in the Homeric Epics1.2.2: Entextualization in the Character Text I1.2.3: Entextualization in the Character Text II1.2.4: The Poet and Entextualization1.3: Homerists on Texts2: Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric EpicsIntroduction2.1: Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines2.2: Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics2.2.1: The Source Text2.2.2: The Target Text2.3: Metapoetic ImplicationsPart II: The Emergence of Written Texts3: Textualization: Dictation and Written Versions of the Iliad and the OdysseyIntroduction3.1: The Dictation Model3.2: A Comparative Approach3.3: The Process of Recording by Hand3.3.1: The Challenges of Manual Transcription3.3.2: Steps to Work around These Challenges and Their Effects3.3.3: The Rare Exceptions3.3.4: Dictated Texts versus Sung Texts3.3.5: What Was Written Down3.3.5.1: The Collector as Gatekeeper3.3.5.2: The Scribal Process3.4: The Collector's Impact on the Oral Text3.4.1: Unwitting Interference (or the Collector's Presence)3.4.2: Purposeful Interference3.5: Editing3.5.1: Field Notes3.5.2: Editorial Work in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries3.5.3: Editorial Work from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century until Today3.6: Best Practices3.7: The Collector's Text versus the Performer's Oral Performance3.8: The Formulations in Section 3.1 Reevaluated3.9: The Evolutionary Model's TranscriptExcursus: The Interventionist Textmaker and Herodotus's HistoriesPart III: Copying Written Texts4: The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric EpicsIntroduction4.1: The Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics4.2: The Nature of the Variation: Not Scribal Error4.3: Accounting for This Variation4.4: The Scribe as Performer4.5: The Scribe as Performer and the Wild Homeric Papyri4.5.1: The Wild Papyri and the Comparanda4.5.2: When?4.5.3: Who?5: Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric EpicsIntroduction5.1: Juxtaposing the Wild Papyri and Helmut van Thiel's Text5.2: Competence and Entextualization5.2.1: Cohesion5.2.2: Coherence5.3: Competence and Completeness5.3.1: Characters Do More Things5.3.2: Nothing Is Assumed5.4: Competence and "Affecting Power"5.4.1: The Emotions5.4.2: The Fulfillment of Expectations and the Groove5.5: Tradition, Traditionalization, and the Intertextual Gap5.6: The Bookroll5.7: The Performing Scribe5.8: Scribal Performance and the Alternatives6: ConclusionEndmatterWorks CitedIndex

Through readings of Homeric passages, examination of variant readings of "wild" papyri, and, above all, wide-ranging comparative evidence, Ready expands our understanding of "text" and retrieves versions of textuality that take place within oral performance.