Pindar's Verbal Art: An Ethnographic Study of Epinician Style
Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2-28-2010
Abstract
In Pindar’s Verbal Art, James Bradley 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.
Recommended Citation
Wells, James Bradley. Pindar’s Verbal Art : An Ethnographic Study of Epinician Style. Center for Hellenic Studies ; Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009.
