Lyfing
09-16-2009, 11:32 PM
How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, by Calvert Watkins.. (http://www.mediafire.com/file/ugnyyzzuoxx/How To Kill a Dragon.pdf)
This book is conceived as both an introduction to, and an original contribution to, comparative Indo-European poetics. Comparative Indo-European poetics may be defined as a linguistic approach—both historical and theoretical, both genetic and typological, both diachronic and synchronic—to the form, nature, and function of poetic language and archaic literature among a variety of ancient Indo-European peoples. These societies spoke related languages, derived from a common ancestral tongue, and occupied then and now most of the territory from the western isles of Europe to the northern half of the Indian subcontinent.
"Philology is the art of reading slowly." My methodology throughout has been a combination of extremely close reading of text passages in the original—all text passages are translated as well—with the traditional Comparative Method. It is my claim that what may be legitimately if tendentiously termed the "genetic intertextuality" of all the versions of certain particular formulas and themes, varying in time, place and language, constitutes a background without which one cannot fully apprehend, understand and appreciate the traditional elements in a given poetic text in an early Indo-European language. In this sense we may speak of a genetic Indo-European comparative literature.
The work consists of seven parts and 59 chapters. These develop first the subtitle (Aspects of Indo-European Poetics) and then the title (How to kill a dragon) of the whole work. Chapters 1-4 of part I set the stage and background for the approach, the comparative method, explore the Saussurian notions of synchrony and diachrony, and locate the various Indo-European traditions in time and space as well as genre. Chapters 5-6 develop the reconstructible ideology of the spoken word in Indo-European society, its perceived ability to produce an effect on the real world (the "truth
formulation"), its perseveration across time, and its extraordinary specificity.
Chapters 7-11 of part II present case studies and selected text analyses from
Greek, Indie, Celtic, Italic, and Anatolian: their form of verbal art. Chapters 12-16then present analyses of inherited phrasal formulas (in the sense of contemporary theory of oral literature), whole noun and verb phrases which are preserved in more than one tradition, inherited stylistic figures, and common traditions of obscurantism and hidden meaning in Vedic and other languages.
Part III (chapters 17-26) explores and argues for the Indo-European antiquity of a liturgical style intermediate between prose and the quantitative Indo-European metrical verse of the Greek and Indie type. I examine this strophic style in some of our oldest monuments of verbal art in liturgy and prayer from Ireland to India, including the central Indo-European royal consecration rite which is the As'vamedha or Horsesacrifice.
Parts IV-VII, the remainder of the book, set forth the evidence for a Common
Indo-European formula expressing the central act of an inherited theme, the serpent or dragon-slaying myth. The 'signature' formula for the myth of the divine hero who slays the serpent recurs in the same linguistic form (derivatives of the IE root *g"hen-, from Greek to English bane) in texts from the Rig Veda (ahann ahim 'he slew the serpent') through Old and Middle Iranian holy books, Hittite myth, Greek epic and lyric, Celtic and Germanic epic and saga down to Armenian oral folk epic of the last century. This formula shapes the narration of 'heroic' killing or overcoming of adversaries over the Indo-European world for millennia. The formula is the vehicle for the central theme of a proto-text, a central part of the symbolic culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European itself. The variations rung on this formula constitute a virtually limitless repository of literary expression in archaic and preliterate Indo- European societies, and their careful study can cast light in unexpected places, and bring together under a single explanation a variety of seemingly unrelated, unconnected text passages in a number of different but related languages. The formula is a precious and precise tool for genetic as well as typological investigation in the study of literature and literary theory. The fact is perhaps well-known to Indo-Europeanists; it is clearly less so to philologists, historians of literature, and literary critics.
Part IV treats the Basic Formula (as I term it, after Renou) and its variants in the narration of the serpent slaying myth, in Indie, Iranian and Hittite (chapters 27-35), Greek (36-42), and Germanic (43-44). Part V (44-48) explores some dragons and dragon-slayers of probable Indo-European antiquity, involving comparison of Old Irish, Hittite, Greek, Indie, and Iranian. Some similarities of Greek and other monsters are genetic in nature, while others are due to contact and diffusion.
Part VI (49-55) is entitled From Myth to Epic, and is concerned primarily with
the interpretation of Greek text passages from Homer to Lysias in which the hero's adversary is not a mythical monster but another hero. The final part VII (56-59), entitled From Myth to Charm, deals with the application of the Basic Formula to the medicine of incantation in a variety of Indo-European traditions (including Hittite), and by adducing new data and different methodology is able to vindicate the controversial claims asserted already in the mid-19th century by Adalbert Kuhn, the "founder" of Indo-European poetics.
Poetics is the study of what makes a verbal message a work of art, in Jakobson' s phrase, and Indo-European poetics, both diachronic and synchronic, is a window onto ancient verbal art. My goal has been to shed some new and different light on just what it is that makes the reading of these ancient texts worthwhile.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ugnyyzzuoxx/How To Kill a Dragon.pdf
Later,
-Lyfing
This book is conceived as both an introduction to, and an original contribution to, comparative Indo-European poetics. Comparative Indo-European poetics may be defined as a linguistic approach—both historical and theoretical, both genetic and typological, both diachronic and synchronic—to the form, nature, and function of poetic language and archaic literature among a variety of ancient Indo-European peoples. These societies spoke related languages, derived from a common ancestral tongue, and occupied then and now most of the territory from the western isles of Europe to the northern half of the Indian subcontinent.
"Philology is the art of reading slowly." My methodology throughout has been a combination of extremely close reading of text passages in the original—all text passages are translated as well—with the traditional Comparative Method. It is my claim that what may be legitimately if tendentiously termed the "genetic intertextuality" of all the versions of certain particular formulas and themes, varying in time, place and language, constitutes a background without which one cannot fully apprehend, understand and appreciate the traditional elements in a given poetic text in an early Indo-European language. In this sense we may speak of a genetic Indo-European comparative literature.
The work consists of seven parts and 59 chapters. These develop first the subtitle (Aspects of Indo-European Poetics) and then the title (How to kill a dragon) of the whole work. Chapters 1-4 of part I set the stage and background for the approach, the comparative method, explore the Saussurian notions of synchrony and diachrony, and locate the various Indo-European traditions in time and space as well as genre. Chapters 5-6 develop the reconstructible ideology of the spoken word in Indo-European society, its perceived ability to produce an effect on the real world (the "truth
formulation"), its perseveration across time, and its extraordinary specificity.
Chapters 7-11 of part II present case studies and selected text analyses from
Greek, Indie, Celtic, Italic, and Anatolian: their form of verbal art. Chapters 12-16then present analyses of inherited phrasal formulas (in the sense of contemporary theory of oral literature), whole noun and verb phrases which are preserved in more than one tradition, inherited stylistic figures, and common traditions of obscurantism and hidden meaning in Vedic and other languages.
Part III (chapters 17-26) explores and argues for the Indo-European antiquity of a liturgical style intermediate between prose and the quantitative Indo-European metrical verse of the Greek and Indie type. I examine this strophic style in some of our oldest monuments of verbal art in liturgy and prayer from Ireland to India, including the central Indo-European royal consecration rite which is the As'vamedha or Horsesacrifice.
Parts IV-VII, the remainder of the book, set forth the evidence for a Common
Indo-European formula expressing the central act of an inherited theme, the serpent or dragon-slaying myth. The 'signature' formula for the myth of the divine hero who slays the serpent recurs in the same linguistic form (derivatives of the IE root *g"hen-, from Greek to English bane) in texts from the Rig Veda (ahann ahim 'he slew the serpent') through Old and Middle Iranian holy books, Hittite myth, Greek epic and lyric, Celtic and Germanic epic and saga down to Armenian oral folk epic of the last century. This formula shapes the narration of 'heroic' killing or overcoming of adversaries over the Indo-European world for millennia. The formula is the vehicle for the central theme of a proto-text, a central part of the symbolic culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European itself. The variations rung on this formula constitute a virtually limitless repository of literary expression in archaic and preliterate Indo- European societies, and their careful study can cast light in unexpected places, and bring together under a single explanation a variety of seemingly unrelated, unconnected text passages in a number of different but related languages. The formula is a precious and precise tool for genetic as well as typological investigation in the study of literature and literary theory. The fact is perhaps well-known to Indo-Europeanists; it is clearly less so to philologists, historians of literature, and literary critics.
Part IV treats the Basic Formula (as I term it, after Renou) and its variants in the narration of the serpent slaying myth, in Indie, Iranian and Hittite (chapters 27-35), Greek (36-42), and Germanic (43-44). Part V (44-48) explores some dragons and dragon-slayers of probable Indo-European antiquity, involving comparison of Old Irish, Hittite, Greek, Indie, and Iranian. Some similarities of Greek and other monsters are genetic in nature, while others are due to contact and diffusion.
Part VI (49-55) is entitled From Myth to Epic, and is concerned primarily with
the interpretation of Greek text passages from Homer to Lysias in which the hero's adversary is not a mythical monster but another hero. The final part VII (56-59), entitled From Myth to Charm, deals with the application of the Basic Formula to the medicine of incantation in a variety of Indo-European traditions (including Hittite), and by adducing new data and different methodology is able to vindicate the controversial claims asserted already in the mid-19th century by Adalbert Kuhn, the "founder" of Indo-European poetics.
Poetics is the study of what makes a verbal message a work of art, in Jakobson' s phrase, and Indo-European poetics, both diachronic and synchronic, is a window onto ancient verbal art. My goal has been to shed some new and different light on just what it is that makes the reading of these ancient texts worthwhile.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ugnyyzzuoxx/How To Kill a Dragon.pdf
Later,
-Lyfing