Sounds like the Anthropocene: Alice Oswald's water-stressed, Homeric verse. Issue 1 (2nd January 2023)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Sounds like the Anthropocene: Alice Oswald's water-stressed, Homeric verse. Issue 1 (2nd January 2023)
- Main Title:
- Sounds like the Anthropocene: Alice Oswald's water-stressed, Homeric verse
- Authors:
- Chisholm, Dianne
- Abstract:
- ABSTRACT: Alice Oswald's two books of Homeric verse, Memorial and Nobody, excavate the Iliad and the Odyssey, respectively, for sounds other than those man-glorifying songs of war and adventure made classical by literary tradition. They stress what Oswald calls the fluid, fleeting "livingness" of oral poetry that literary culture arguably deadens in its efforts to standardise and monumentalise Homer' s heroic narrative. To adjust the poetic balance between livingness and lastingness, Oswald distils Homer's narrative to its evanescent and/or atmospheric elements and she foregrounds those diluvial clamours which repeatedly drown out the hero's boasts and shouts, dampen his immortal aspirations and dissolve his bronze-clad psyche. This essay shows how Oswald's recovery of Homer's oral poetry in modern English verse concerns our approach to Anthropocene turbulence wherein we, her readers, might find ourselves adrift. It examines Oswald's strategy of stressing Homer's aquatic fluency at the expense of his heroic-anthropocentric-narrative and in view of Anthropocene philosophy that calls for a shift from imperial, instrumental thinking about water as an exploitable global resource to empathic thinking with water as a companion, supra-human, species.
- Is Part Of:
- Textual practice. Volume 37:Issue 1(2023)
- Journal:
- Textual practice
- Issue:
- Volume 37:Issue 1(2023)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 37, Issue 1 (2023)
- Year:
- 2023
- Volume:
- 37
- Issue:
- 1
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2023-0037-0001-0000
- Page Start:
- 68
- Page End:
- 89
- Publication Date:
- 2023-01-02
- Subjects:
- Alice Oswald -- homer -- Anthropocene -- water -- contemporary poetry
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals
Semiotics -- Periodicals
801.95 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/current ↗
http://www.tandfonline.com/ ↗
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0950236X.asp ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1080/0950236X.2021.1971755 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0950-236X
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 8813.780460
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 25175.xml