Subject: Re: [lojban] "generic Odysseys"

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 18:31:26 EST

In a message dated 11/12/2001 11:08:14 AM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Poems don't have corporate authors. They may very well draw on
> a large stock of traditional expressions, but that doesn't mean
> that one person didn't write the whole thing.
> 
> I am willing to suppose that a different person wrote each, because
> we have no other evidence of anyone writing more than one full-dress
> epic right up through modern times.
> 

Well, I think there are a goodly number of pieces that have to be given 
corporate authorship -- great swathes of the Bible, for example. This is 
more than just using rtaditional bits and pieces and more than just revising 
and editing though it has aspects of each of these. To be sure, someone 
wrote the mess down eventually and perhaps put the final touches on that 
version, but he was not the author, nor was any other one person -- each 
contributed a bit (and many detracted bits as well) but no one did it all or, 
probably, the majority of it. Unlike the case of most of Shakespeare (or 
whoever -- if we know more about him than any other poet of his place and 
time --more than Spenser who had a long public career? more than the ones 
with University degrees and papers filed away?-- than we know damn-all about 
any of them).

<> and largely feminine in the latter case.

Evidence?>

Tends to start with internals -- the vivid domestic scenes not found in 
other epics -- and then to build externally. The first formal work is some 
Samuel Butler or other's (I can't keep 'em straight over three centuries) 
Authoress of the Odyssey. Robert Graves did a novel Homer's Daughters on the 
subject, with his usual long afternote. And someone from Cape Town (no handy 
references -- Benjamin Farrington?) did a thorough modern (mine, not even 
yours) study. I suspect there are newer ones by feminist theorists