In everything else resembling the gods: peculiarities of monsters in relation to gods and heroes in Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Odyssey and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo

• Grant number: 12/17692-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2012
• End date: July 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Christian Werner
• Grantee: Camila Aline Zanon
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Assuming that gods, heroes and monsters encode values from the society that created or incorporated them, the aim is to understand what monsters, which is the least studied of the three categories, can express through the encoding they enclose within three poems: Hesiod's Theogony, Homer's Odyssey and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Basing on some selected passages from those three poems, and considering the peculiarities of each tradition or poetic genre they belong to, the aim is to understand what the creatures that appear in such poems are, how they can be differentiated from gods and heroes, their naming and qualities, and their narrative and ontological roles within Hesiodic and Homeric cosmogonies. Through studies of social and cultural anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and cognition theorists such as Dan Sperber, the intention is to approach the issue from theories of taxonomy and liminality, since the current definitions for what monsters are don't give a satisfactory account of the peculiarities they have in relation to gods and heroes. (AU)

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

ZANON, Camila Aline. Where the monsters are: prodigious creatures in archaic hexametric poetry. 2016. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.