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Etymologicum Magnum s.v. ἔγχος (313, 3): ὁ δὲ Σοφοκλῆς τὴν σφαῖραν ἔγχος κέκληκεν, οἶον 'τὸ δ' ἔγχος ἐν ποσὶ κυλίνδεται'. Sophocles has called a ball egkhos ('spear'), as in 'and the egkhos rolls to (someone's) feet'. The quoted fragment is generally assigned to Sophocles' Nausicaa (or Plyntriai). This suggestion dates back to nineteenth-century scholarship, is found in the editions of Pearson and Radt, and has been accepted by LSJ (s.v. ἔγχος II. 'of Nausicaa's ball '). Certainly, the Nausicaa will have included a version of the famous scene in which the Phaeacian princess and her maidens enjoy a game of ball. Pearson thought it probable that the words are part of Odysseus' speech at the court of Alcinous (cf. Od. 7.290), in which he would have recalled Nausicaa's misdirected cast (cf. 6.115). The feet, on this view, are Odysseus' own. According to Welcker, Odysseus calls the ball an ἔγχος, 'because it reached him like a missile'. This is awkward: an ἔγχος is properly a thrusting spear and, at any rate, the quality of being thrown does not enter into the immediate image, as the fragment's object is said to reach someone's feet rolling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadening the interdisciplinary base of study on Renaissance Homer, this essay looks to cassone (wedding chest) painting in the Quattrocento to explore how the textual reception of the “Odyssey” was enriched by the visual arts. As artifacts, wedding chests had a role in the public sphere, though they were destined for the private, and they made the epic available to audiences of nonelites. Nausicaa is a key figure, merging the vernacular courtly love tradition and romance. In working across the fields of literary study and art history, this essay introduces new critical concepts to account for the complexities of Renaissance reception of Homer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new interpretation of Archilochus' First Cologne Epode (fr. 196a W) by reading it as a sustained travesty of an epic seduction scene. The article begins by setting out the flexibility of the epic type-scene, with an analysis of the Dios Apate in Iliad 14, Aphrodite's seduction of Anchises in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and Odysseus' encounter with Nausicaa in Odyssey 6. The second part of the article demonstrates that the Cologne Epode is structured around the same core elements, but at every stage Archilochus subverts expectations by offering something that parodies epic convention. Reading the Epode as a vulgar iambic reworking of an epic tradition not only gives us insight into its sophistication but also helps resolve some of the interpretative difficulties which have long plagued scholars working on the poem, and in particular helps us see what is achieved by the poem's surprising ending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how figures of temporality, disfiguration and orgasm in the ''Nausicaa'' episode of Joyce's Ulysses come together to allegorise unreadability. I argue that the text's invocation of a '' contretemps'' to figure a scene of indigestion elicits a temporality of shock, producing a counternarrative that thwarts (vomits up) the ostensible readability it purports. Moreover, the principles of ideality and transparency commonly associated with the sentimental mode are countervailed by the episode's transgressive rhetorical shocks: a public display of onanistic activity and the revelation of Gerty's ''lame leg''. The text's renderings of Gerty's disfiguration as well as the orgasmic both work to allegorise unreadability; I also suggest that they ramify ontologically. Drawing on Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, I investigate the co-articulation of ontology and tropology in ''Nausicaa'' to adumbrate a theory of ''ontotropology'' -- the figuration of ontology as an undecidable condition of tropological surfeit born out of temporal disjunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines a literary analysis of Medea's dream (A.R. 3.616-35) in terms of Homeric models with a consideration of developments taking place in post-Homeric dream theory. Nausicaa's dream is generally considered the primary influence for this passage, but Medea's psychological characterization owes a great deal more to Penelope and her conflicted emotional state. As an adaptation of Penelope's psychological dilemma, Medea's dream is grounded in the originally Platonic notion that an irrational disposition can cause shameful dreams. The influence of this idea on Apollonius most likely came through a Stoic channel and enabled Medea to be presented negatively in terms of specific irrational passions. Medea's dream should thus not be thought of as inspired by the gods in the strict Homeric sense but as a manifestation of her brewing passion, which enables the gods to intervene indirectly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the Hungarian and Romanian renderings of Bloom's unfinished I. AM. A. message at the end of the book "Nausicaa." It offers a standard example of grammatical and semantic indeterminanacy and narratological gap that attacks readers to fill it in. The author argues on Bloom's meaningless self-identification of linguistic effects which leaves less space to the play of indeterminacy.

The study first establishes a set of formal properties of Ulysses through a computational approach based on frequency counts of the ninety‐nine most common words of the text. The common words are first used to discriminate interior monologue, dialogue, and narrative, and then to discriminate between the different narrative styles of the text. The discriminations are achieved by means of multivariate statistics, such as principal component analysis, and by distribution tests (Student's t‐test and Mann–Whitney test). Using the linguistic premise that all matter is meaning, as well as Bakhtin's argument that all language is ideo‐logically saturated, the study then explores the relationship between common words, meaning, and ideology. It concentrates on the Gerty MacDowell section of episode 13 of Ulysses in order to show how common words that appear more frequently in that episode than in others—such as two modals, two causal conjunctions, and one preposition—are integral to the various syntactic structures that differentiate styles and contribute to the meaning and ideology of the text. The article links these discriminations to Bakhtin's concept of polyphony and to his discussion of the ‘creation of specific novelistic images of languages’. Its conclusion, therefore, is that computational analysis of style can open interpretation to details of form, meaning, and ideology that enable humanities computing to make a distinctive contribution to literary criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the meaning of Nausicaa's words in lines 6.273-88 of the epic poetry "Odyssey," by Homer. Greek verb found in the context of sexual relationships; Words used to indicate Nausicaa's readiness for marriage.