| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,600,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥2,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,300,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This year, following the research results from the study of "the controversy of ancients and moderns, the focus has been put on the Homeric scholar, Robert Wood, who initiated a positivist investigation in the classical studies, in the hope that we may reveal the way in which the discourse of classics in the eighteenth-century England was formed. The discourse of classics which was prevalent prior to Wood had been that represented by Alexander Pope, whose An Essay on Homer is based on the idea of Homer the genius, Wood, on the other hand, went to Greece twice, traveling around and made observations on location. His Essay on the Genius of Homer is a positivist endeavor to identify the world described in the works of Homer with that of the actuality he observed. In this instance, "the genius of Homer" was tantamount to the ability to imitate nature. But, this principle of imitation would inevitably bring the Homeric scholars to the practice of "oral tradition, " which was still extant in those days in the region. This collective practice of poetic creation, in turn, gave rise to the innovative insights, which would break down the Romantic notion of the individual Homer the genius, on the one hand, and hrghlight the problematics of the authenticity of the "text" and its origins. The discourse of classic in the eighteenth century was ultimately to give rise to the problems of unattainability of the original meaning and the inevitability of the textual mediacy.
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