The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition announces
The 29th Albert Lord and Milman Parry Lecture
The Tale of Meleager in the Iliad
Jonathan Burgess
Professor
Department of Classics
University of Toronto
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
7:00 p.m.
John K. Hulston Hall
Room 7
University of Missouri
Reception to follow
Jonathan Burgess is a professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. He has worked extensively on early Greek epic, with a special interest in Epic Cycle literary and mythological history. His 2001 The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle applies oral theory and neoanalysis to place the Iliad and Odyssey in the larger, often overlooked context of the entire body of Greek epic poetry of the Archaic Age. His more recent 2014 "introduction" to Homer thoroughly explores important issues in the authorship and scholarship of the Homeric poems and traces their interpretation and reception from the oldest of sources to the modern era, a valuable and accessible tool for anyone interested in Homer. A long term project focuses on the Odyssey and travel literature, wherein he is especially interested in the reception of the Odyssey. Recent papers have interpreted along such lines the Tempest, William Bartram, Huckleberry Finn, and Cold Mountain. He also oversees a website dedicated to the localization of Odysseus in antiquity and modern travel literature, and is also working on a paper on the socio-political relations of Ithaca with mainland Greece.