From thompson@jlc.net Wed Apr  7 15:58:03 1999
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Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 18:59:04 -0400
To: classics@u.washington.edu
From: George Thompson <thompson@jlc.net>
Subject: Re: Literary Concentricity (?), Symmetry
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Just to add to Jim Helm's ref. to Whitman's analysis of the Iliad:

One finds ring structures very frequently in Vedic poetry, though generally
found compressed within individual stanzas. On a larger and more intricate
scale, one finds it in Avestan, in the Gathas of Zarathustra. By the way,
the term 'chaismus' is sometimes used to characterize this phenomenon.

You will find massive evidence of ring composition in a variety of
Indo-European poetic traditions in Watkins, *How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects
of Indo-European Poetics*.

Saussure noticed this phenomenon nearly a hundred years ago, and Jakobson
has explored it as well, both in Slavic and on an abstract theoretical
plane, in his discussions of the poetic function.

With a little shift in perspective, this is what Biblical parallelism is
all about too. I think.

Best wishes,

George Thompson

At 11:39 AM 4/7/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>Well, there is Whitman's elaborate structural analysis of the Iliad,
>published in his  _Homer and the Heroic Tradition_ (Harvard, 1958), which
>includes chapters entitled, "Homer and Geometric Art", and "The Geometric
>Structure of the _Iliad_".    Jim Helm


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