Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad

by Ready, Jonathan L.

• ISBN13: 9780192870971
• ISBN10: 0192870971
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-10-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.


Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad explains why people care about this foundational epic poem and its characters. It represents the first book-length application to the Iliad of research in communications, literary studies, media studies, and psychology on how readers of a story or viewers of a play, movie, or television show find themselves immersed in the tale and identify with the characters. Immersed recipients get wrapped up in a narrative and the world it depicts and lose track to some degree of their real-world surroundings. Identification occurs when recipients interpret the storyworld from a character's perspective, feel emotions congruent with those of the character, and root for the character to succeed. This volume situates modern research on these experiences in relation to ancient criticism on how audiences react to narratives. It then offers close readings of select episodes and detailed analyses of recurring features to show how the Iliad immerses both ancient and modern recipients and encourages them to identify with its characters. Accessible to students and researchers, to those inside and outside of classical studies, this interdisciplinary project aligns research on the Iliad with contemporary approaches to storyworlds in a range of media. It thereby opens new frontiers in the study of ancient Greek literature and helps investigators of audience engagement from antiquity to the present contextualize and historicize their own work.

Author Biography

Jonathan L. Ready, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Michigan

Jonathan L. Ready is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at the University of Miami and at Indiana University. He is co-editor of Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters (University of Texas Press 2018), and he co-edits the annual Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (Brill).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Identification and the Iliad
2. The Study of Identification
3. Prompts for (a Study of) Identifying with Characters
4. Identification with Mortals and Gods
Immersion and the Iliad
5. Ancients and Moderns on Immersion
6. Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Immersion
7. Emotional Immersion
8. Content and Form
9. Conclusion
Works Cited
Index of Greek Passages
Index of Terms