Homer and the Art of Storytelling

Abstract

There is not a day that passes when we do not tell a friend or a family member an anecdote concerning events that have happened to us in the course of the day, or pass on a story that we ourselves have heard. We make stories out of events of all kinds: the shocking, the amusing, the trivial, and the momentous. Each of us is something of an expert on storytelling:we all know, instinctively, how to go about it, and there are some who can make a great success of any story. Western culture, like any other, has a long tradition of storytelling, which we can trace back for thousands of years. The first of our storytellers to be recorded, the epic poet Homer, has always been regarded as a master-storyteller. But few have paused to examine his storytelling habits from the perspective of storytellers today. Show more