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Record W2291535695 · doi:10.14288/1.0096445

Theocritus and the reversal of literary tradition

2010· article· en· W2291535695 on OpenAlexaff
Amanda Jane Cater

Bibliographic record

VenuecIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicClassical Antiquity Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLiteraturePhilosophyLiterary criticismHistoryArtAesthetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

My purpose is to demonstrate Theocritus' treatment of traditional literary genres. I show the specialized character of the bucolic genre by concentrating on the combination of epic, tragic and bucolic elements in selected poems of Theocritus. My concern is the portrayal of characters and character-types from myth and literary tradition and how the traditional literary portrayal has been changed. My discussion of Theocritus' poetic technique is divided into two parts. The first section deals with Theocritus' method of "reducing" or down-grading figures who have previously been presented and accepted as heroes. This section is introduced by a brief survey of the changing attitudes towards heroes in Greek literature from Homer to Theocritus. This is followed by a discussion of four poems which illustrate Theocritus' inversion of the standard portrait. This treatment ranges from a humorous recasting of the status of Polyphemos (Idyll 11) and Herakles (Idylls 13 and 24) to a critical portrayal of the Dioscuri (Idyll 22). The second part deals with the technique operating in reverse. In this section, I show how Theocritus juxtaposes epic themes with 'low-life' scenes and how the characters involved are consequently upgraded or 'elevated1. The four poems I select endow their insignificant protagonists with heroic amplitude. In Idyl 1 1, epic and tragic elements are infused into the portrayal of Daphnis the cowherd. Simaetha in Idyll 2 envisages herself as a Medea in a context of bourgeois reality. The mythological material in Idyll 3 achieves humour from the disparity of the goatherd's rustic simplicicy and his awareness of mythological precedents. Idyll 7 expands the anti-heroic material of the Odyssey and describes a goatherd with a difference. In my conclusion I demonstrate the coherence of Theocritus' treatment of epic and dramatic narrative with his programmatic statements. The passages referred to are the epilogue of Idyll 22 (212-23), the characters cited in Idyll 16 (36-57), Simichidas' speech in Idyll 7 (45-48) and the description of the herdman's cup in Idyll 1. (29-61). In the light of this, I link Theocritus' poetic method to his attitude to the function of literature and its relation to society.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.951
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.197
Teacher spread0.188 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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