The study proposes that oral-traditonnal cultures, or cultures with a high degree of orality, use similar processes to hide political or social subversion in text. To test this hypothesis, the author examines three texts from three highly oral cultures: a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, Homer's Odyssey and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent. The author finds that in all three texts subversion is concealed according to what she defines as the three principles of disguise: articulation, by which a text hides secondary meaning through its use of diction and syntax; construction, by which a text incorporates hidden transcripts or meaning within its narrative or textual structure; and diversion, by which a text directs the audience away from subversive meaning by focusing attention on other elements. All three principles of disguise exploit the relationship between the written text and the oral-traditional environment in which the text was used. The three-principle model of disguise enables us to set in comparative perspective relationships between the processes of communication and resistance in diverse cultures, and offers significant opportunities for comparative study. The author concludes that texts from diverse cultures may be employed similarly as extensions of oral tradition, especially when there is a need to conceal particular ideas from a dominant hegemony, and that reading these texts "against the grain" for evidence of subsurface subversion promises a deeper insight into both the function of text as a tool of resistance and the dynamics of human power relationships. / Graduate

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Often praised for its sophistication in the narrator- and character-text, the Odyssey is regarded as the ultimate epic of a warrior’s much-troubled nostos. As a corollary of both its theme and the polytropia of the main hero, the poem explores extensively the motifs of secrecy and disguise. Apart from the lying tales of Odysseus, one important, albeit less obvious, example of the tendency to secrecy and disguise is the exchanges between the gods, which constitute a distinct group of speeches that have significant implications for the action of the poem. The aim of this dissertation is to study the divine dialogues of the Odyssey from the angle of communication and persuasion. Employing findings from narratology, discourse analysis, and oral poetics, and through close readings of the Homeric text, I argue that the overwhelming majority of these related passages have certain characteristics, whose common denominator is obliqueness. Apart from Helius’ appeal to Zeus (Chapter 2), distinctive in its own narratorial rendition, the rest of the dialogues, namely Hermes’ message-delivery to Calypso (Prologue), the two divine assemblies (Chapter 1), plus the exchanges of Zeus with Poseidon (Chapter 2) and Athena (Epilogue) conform to set patterns of communication. Within this framework, interlocutors strongly tend towards concealment and partiality. They make extensive use of conversational implicatures, shed light only on certain sides of the story while suppressing others, and present feigned or even exaggerated arguments in order to persuade their addressee. Direct confrontation is in principle avoided, and even when it does occur, it takes a rather oblique form. In this communicative scheme, the procedure of decision-making is not clear-cut, and the concept of persuasion is fluid and hidden behind the indirect and subtle dialogic process.

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This dissertation examines the depiction of the parent-child relationship in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In this examination, I focus on the representation of this phenomenon as it applies to Achilles and Hector, as the respective protagonist and antagonist of the former poem, and to Odysseus, the protagonist of the latter. The parent-child relationship has been selected as the subject of investigation on the grounds of the fundamental nature and extensive presence of this phenomenon in human life, and, consequently, in literature. The primary reason for the selection of the Iliad and the Odyssey for this study of the literary representation of this phenomenon is the status that these poems enjoy as the earliest extant works in Western literature, whose reputation and influence have endured through the centuries to modern times. The other reason is that they provide a rich source of the literary representation of the parent-child relationship. The inclusion of both Homeric poems in the investigation offers a broader spectrum of parent-child relationships and a wider range of parent-child related situations, issues, and outcomes. In each poem, the poet concentrates on the biological parent-child relationships of the heroes, although other supplementary relationships also feature. Assisted by narratological analysis, I examine the three heroes’ parent-child relationships in terms of their triadic structure of father-mother-son, and of the dyadic relationships encompassed by this triad, namely, father-son, mother-son, and father/husband-mother/wife. Each hero is depicted as both a son and a father; hence the triads to be examined are, for Achilles, the Peleus-Thetis-Achilles natal triad and the Achilles-[Deidamia]-Neoptolemus procreative triad (represented in the poem only by the father-son relationship), for Hector, the Priam-Hecuba-Hector natal triad and the Hector-Andromache-Astyanax procreative triad, and for Odysseus, the Laertes-Anticleia-Odysseus natal triad and the Odysseus-Penelope-Telemachus procreative triad. A significant feature to emerge from the examination of each of these triads and associated dyads is the poet’s use of the affective dimension of the parent-child relationship to make the epic hero more accessible, and the epic situations and events more meaningful to the audience. In addition to exploiting the universal appeal of the affective dimension, the examination of the representation of this relationship in the poems provides insights into socio-culturally determined aspects of the society depicted. On the structural thematic level the parent-child relationships of Achilles and Hector in the Iliad, and of Odysseus in the Odyssey provide a thematic thread woven into the central theme of each poem. Thus we see that these heroic epics tell stories that are not only about heroic warriors, but also about the other participants in their natal and procreative triads: their parents, wives, and sons. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, 2010.

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Delphic Suite is a composition for orchestra that depicts specific events narrated in Homer's epic tale, Odyssey. For the purpose of this thesis the second movement, Raid on Ismarus, has been omitted so as to focus on the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic structures of the first movement, Lament from Troy, and the third movement, Ruler of the Winds. Each of these musical parameters will be analyzed in order to illustrate the Suite's imitation of compositional techniques exemplified in the music of Homer's era, and the musical results obtained by juxtaposing those parameters upon a twentieth-century tonal scheme that provides the Suite with an eclectic ambience.

This thesis raises and explores questions concerning the popularity of the Homeric poems in ancient Greece. It asks why the Iliad and Odyssey held such continuing appeal among the Greeks of the Archaic and Classical age. Cultural products such as poetry cannot be separated from the sociopolitical conditions in which and for which they were originally composed and received. Working on the basis that the extent of Homer’s appeal was inspired and sustained by the peculiar and determining historical circumstances, I set out to explore the relation of the social, political and ethical conditions and values of Archaic and Classical Greece to those portrayed in the Homeric poems. The Greeks, at the time during which Homer was composing his poems, had begun to establish a new form of social organisation: the polis. By examining historical, literary and philosophical texts from the Archaic and Classical age, I explore the manner in which Greek society attempted to reorganise and reconstitute itself in a different way, developing original modes of social and political activity which the new needs and goals of their new social reality demanded. I then turn to examine Homer’s treatment of and response to this social context, and explore the various ways in which Homer was able to reinterpret and reinvent the inherited stories of adventure and warfare in order to compose poetry that not only looks back to the highly centralised and bureaucratic society of the Mycenaean world, but also looks forward, insistently so, to the urban reality of the present. I argue that Homer’s conflation of a remembered mythical age with the contemporary conditions and values of Archaic and Classical Greece aroused in his audiences a new perception and understanding of human existence in the altered sociopolitical conditions of the polis and, in so doing, ultimately contributed to the development of new ideas on the manner in which the Greeks could best live together in their new social world.

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