Ms. Brann is a much-beloved Tutor at St. Johns College, long a bastion of focus on the "Great Books". She has an amazing ability to reach behind the "scholarly" interpretation of Homer to the essentials that rare relevant for all of us. While the book focuses primarily on the Odyssey and the illuminative "moments" in the text, the Illiad is also well represented. You will not have to re-read the Illiad and the Odyssey to take great pleasure from Ms. Branns book, though you will probably want to. She isolates specific areas of the texts as illustrative of the great insights of Homer and demonstrates how these incidences showcase some of the basic thoughts that ultimately resonate through Western literature. essay writing for high school students
The text is crisp, flows well and "Homeric Moments" makes for interesting, challenging and very enjoyable reading.
Brann has done a delightful thing in writing Homeric Moments, and in so doing has won, with her much-glancing and everywhere-sparkling wit, a battle in the War on the WC. While many react to the relegation of the essential books to the backshelves of decaying library stacks, Brann has placed one copy of Homer in a magic box so that boys and girls one day, after all the Seven Volumes of Harry Potter are written and digested (a little boy wizard goes a long way), might find something that is more moving than magic, more charming than charmed. I think many of us who would advocate for the traditional canon are quite aware that nobodys been reading it for years and years. I went off to college in the early 70s (yes, to the place where she taught--although I read Homer with two other incredible teachers, and I dont believe there was a single faculty member in the entire school who couldnt teach Homer). My friends who went to other schools did not read Homer. Or Plato. Certainly not Euclid. Absolutely not Apollonius of Perga on the Conic Sections. So the fiery umbrage over reading books "not like us" seems a little like the lady protesting too much over what is more insubstantial than sound and more fleeting than fury. Yes, I love reading the outraged and wonderful arguments of Harold Bloom--but hes only written for those of us who are so made as to delight utterly in our own pretensions and affectations. Or worse, for those who simply want to buy that lovely big book in the hopes of reading it someday--and who know people seeing it lying around on the sofa will be far more interested in what Bloom has to say about everything than what Ben Johnson has to say about anything (well, enough to read the New York Times Review of Books to find out what Bloom might have to say about something).
Brann has written for anyone, and she just well might succeed in getting a few people off on a race that only starts with Homer--once you start you cant stop,--and youll be reading Lucretius, Heroditus, Cervantes, Joyce, Tolstoy. Its one of the few ways we have before us to earn the space we take up in this world--letting Homer and his ilk say to us what they would have us hear and teach us what we know we ought to know.
There is a side to the Branns book, though, that I never expected. The most casual comments about learning (i.e., that you start to learn wisdom only after becoming who you are--finishing the growing up part--because if you arent who you are, then whos there to grow wise), are stunningly beautiful. Her years of learning are informed by her years of teaching, and the interplay of these two essential, and entirely contrasting, enterprises in the life of a real teacher illuminate this book with a sweetness that I believe few of us get to experience in the halls of academe.
Her delight with Homer reflects, I think, her delight with her own luck at being alive in the world--this is apparent from the smile on her face in the tiny photo on the back.
Come on in. Jump into the wine-colored sea. When you get over thinking how fruity it is to call it wine-colored you just may get drunk on common sea water. Branns quite willing to pour another glass for you.
Homer without the "angst"
The Canon Without the Retort