Pindar's verbal art
Subtitle: an ethnographic study of epinician style
By: James Bradley Wells
Series: Hellenic studies -- 40; Hellenic studies -- 40.
Publisher: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University; Distributed by Harvard University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Washington, DC; Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 266
ISBN-13: 9780674036277
Description: "In Pindar's Verbal Art, Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. This is the first study of Pindar's language that applies performance as a method for the ethnographic description and interpretation of entextualized records of verbal art. In Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, Pindar's Verbal Art is a sociological stylistics of epinician language and demonstrates that Pindar's is a highly dialogical form of art, an intertextual web of voices, whose study enables us to appreciate popular dimensions of his songs. Wells offers a new take on recurrent Pindaric questions: genre, the unity of the victory song, tradition, and, principally, epinician performance."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-254) and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Philology as perspective on the interaction of language and social life; title: Text and sign; title: Epinikion as event; title: Ways of epinician speaking I; title: Ways of epinician speaking II; title: Novelistic features of epinician style.