{"title":"Brett Robbins","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"birth-of-cinema-book-brett-robbins-9780692828861","title":"The Birth of Cinema","description":"In his Poetics, the cornerstone of narratology, Aristotle establishes plot as the most, and spectacle as the least, important of the six elements of tragedy. This initiates a bias for time and against space that continues to shape the narratological agenda to the present day. In the only book-length treatment of narrative space in Homer to date, Brigitte Hellwig reduces the wealth of spatial detail in the Iliad and Odyssey to a finite number of places and charts their trajectory throughout each respective epic. As such, she applies to space the structuralist methodology typically devoted to time, extracting from it as hypothetical temporality that subordinates experience to exegesis and disregards all but those spatial phenomena that survive the process of paraphrase. There exists, however, an aesthetic dimension of narrative as well, within which actions are conveyed to the audience in real time before they are abstracted into story-events. In this book, I offer a narratological reading of Homer's Iliad from the standpoint of space rather than, the usual emphasis, time. I adapt Meyer Schapiro's conception of the picture frame as a finding and focusing device placed between the observer and the image to the dynamic medium of epic narrative, and establish the manipulation of frames as the basis for a poetics of narrative engagement. I demonstrate how Homer employs four cinematic devices in the Iliad-decomposition, intercutting, meta-audience, and vignette-to achieve montage-like control over his audience's attention and to reveal a semantic component of the epic that manifests itself exclusively within narrative space.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49777381474577,"sku":"CIN0692828869VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":54107081703697,"sku":"NIN9780692828861","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0692828869.jpg?v=1786120464"},{"product_id":"before-you-read-homer-book-brett-robbins-9780692493205","title":"Before You Read Homer","description":"This book takes you on a short journey-a weekend cruise, if you will-through ancient Greek myth, leading you up to Homer's doorstep. It proceeds chronologically but it's not dominated by chronology. It's important to know when events occur but mainly in relation to one another, not because the numbers are themselves important. We'll be stopping off at the ports I find most intriguing, primarily from the standpoint of how myth informs various aspects of Greek culture. Many more trips remain to be taken, however, and this book is intended to be a launch-pad for your own. The ancient Greeks lived in a world before the Internet, before airplanes, before trains, before the telegraph. They had only myths to transmit through writing and images on vases and sculptures and buildings. Myths were their only mode of transportation and communication combined. There were no TVs, no newspapers. Just traveling bards singing songs so enthralling that their myths were absorbed by the bloodstream unconsciously, as the collective assumptions of society. Sometimes words and images were used to try to explain things, sometimes they served the interests of those who commissioned them to be propagated. How did everyone in Greece know to worship Zeus and Heracles? Myths. Myth linked otherwise disparate communities through the shared currency of the Greek language. Myth is a fungible cultural technology: its ability to be disseminated via various artistic media made it the most feasible way for distant poleis to communicate with each other in something like the way we do more efficiently today via the mass media. The myths, then, had to captivate their audiences as quickly and powerfully as possible. Hence the sensationalistic imagery they inspired, the outrageous actions perpetrated by larger-than-life characters. It all seemed so outlandish, so unrealistic, so overtly fictional. And yet, Theseus was both a king and a hero, Zeus was both a god and a king. There was overlap between these worlds. And there still is today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50125917094161,"sku":"CIN0692493204G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51005987258641,"sku":"NIN9780692493205","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52104806662417,"sku":"CIN0692493204VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0692493204.jpg?v=1786113571"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-brett-robbins.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}