The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.74 (772 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0521690471 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 236 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-12 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
hreeves@ricochet.net said Jonathan Gottschall. The Rape of Troy: Emotion, Violence, and the World of Homer. Cambridge University Press.. The rigid division between the humanities and the sciences has been lamented now for the better part of the last hundred years. With The Rape of Troy, Jonathan Gottschall aims to build a bridge over a small section of this divide. Armed with a theoretical apparatus that i. "The Ape in Achilles" according to Amazon Customer. Turf-defending classicists may dismiss this work, but it's more interesting than any of the several books I've read by specialists on Homer. And it's far more compelling than such novelistic readings as those of Bernard Knox appended to the Fagles versions.It places Homer. "Great title, Great book" according to Michael Damian Gehlhausen. People have been writing about Homer for 2500 years. So, as the author says at the outset of the Rape of Troy, "it is not easy to say anything new about Homer," and it is even harder to say things that are both new AND true. But by bringing together information from biolo
Using a fascinating and innovative approach, Professor Gottschall analyses Homeric conflict from the perspective of modern evolutionary biology, attributing its intensity to a shortage of available young women. The Rape of Troy integrates biological and humanistic understanding - biological theory is used to explore the ultimate sources of pitched Homeric conflict, and Homeric society is the subject of a bio-anthropological case study of why men fight.. The warrior practice of taking enemy women as slaves and concubines meant that women were concentrated in the households of powerful men. Homer's epics reflect an eighth-century BCE world of warrior tribes that were fractured by constant strife; aside from its fantastic scale, nothing is exceptional about Troy's conquest by the Greeks. In turn, this shortage drove men to compete fiercely over women: almost all the main conflicts of the Iliad and Odyssey can be traced back to disputes over women
"Gottschall escorts us to the rich but sparsely inhabited borderland between anthropology, biology, and literary analysis, where he has found gold. He has written a small masterpiece of evolutionary-literary analysis. It crackles with intellectual vigor, academic rigor, and the prospect of triggering a revolution in research at the intersection of anthropology, biology, and literatureGottschall's account of "Homeric tragedy" rises to a level of sanguinary poetry that might make Cormac McCarthy envious." --David Barash, University of Washington, Journal of Human Biology"There is no way to get bored with Gottschall. The Rape of Troy is an original and i
Jonathan Gottschall is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College. . He co-edited (with David Sloan Wilson) The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (2005) and has published numerous articles seeking to bridge the humanities-sciences divide