Book review: Understanding Homer
In telling the story of his life, Kanigel unites it with Parry’s work to frame a single, massive question: What’s the relationship between tradition and inspiration? Born middle-class in Oakland in 1902, Milman Parry became famous posthumously for his idea that The Odyssey and The Iliad, thought by many to have been written by an individual human being named “Homer,” were actually the accumulated results of centuries of oral performance by different people.
Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry By Robert Kanigel
Reviewed by Jo Livingstone
His argument was that the name we give to that supposed author disguised a bias modern folk have for writing and against listening. In Kanigel’s words, literary critics of the twentieth century associated reading and writing with “advanced civilizations,” and disliked the “repetition and stereotype” that characterizes oral poetry, a leaning that “blinded them to the fecund richness of illiterate cultures.” Although this theory had been modestly proposed by a number of scholars before Parry, and the groundwork was laid by the French scholar Marcel Jousse, who himself grew up amid the oral songsmithery of a largely illiterate community in France, Parry’s innovation lay in the scientific way he proved his inklings...,.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162267/milman-parry-changed-understanding-homer-forever
