10 Lecture 1- Form and Narrative Style: The Epic

10 Lecture 1- Form and Narrative Style: The Epic

by Karly Passmore

​Style: The way an author combines form and content. This depends on syntax, word choice and tone (voice).

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​Examples:

​1. Expository- amis to tell audience about a subject, and then share their opinion.

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​2. Descriptive- aims to describe a character, event or place. employs sensory details and imagery.

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​2. Persuasive: aims to convince the audience of an idea or argument.

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​3. Narrative: aims to tell a story.

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Literary Form and Style in Epic literature

​Literary Form is the arrangement or framework of content (content is the story, its characters, or the words themselves).

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​In Ancient culture, form itself was considered to be beautiful, just for being structured in some way.

​A Novel is a composition written in the form of fictional prose narrative, in which the characters' actions and words function to determine and unfold the plot of the narrative.

​Frame narrative: Story

within the story

​"Pericopes" (more on this

​in parables)

​THE EPIC

​A long narrative in verse, that retells the story of a heroic journey of one ind. or a group.

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​Characterized by: superhuman actions, adventure, stylized language, mixture of lyrical and dramatic traditions.

​The "Hero's Journey" builds the structure and serves as the content of the Epic's plot, but is not exclusively in the Epic's form.

​Examples:

​Gilgamesh, Mahabharata,

​Homer, and Virgil

​Homeric Epic

​Written in verse: Dactylic Hexameter, Standardized for greek and latin oral poetry.

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Homeric verse is characterized by extended similes and formulaic phrases. His books usually begin with an "invocation of the muse"

​SPEAK, MEMORY—                                      

   Of the cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again After he plundered Troy's sacred heights.

                                                        Speak Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped, The suffering deep in his heart at sea As he struggled to survive and bring his men home But could not save them, hard as he tried— The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun, And that god snuffed out their day of return.

                                   Of these things,

Speak, Immortal One, And tell the tale once more in our time.

By now, all the others who had fought at Troy— At least those who had survived the war and the sea— Were safely back home. Only Odysseus Still longed to return to his home and his wife. The nymph Calypso, a powerful goddess— And beautiful—was clinging to him In her caverns and yearned to possess him.