Literature Stream Seminars: "Plant-based Poetics? A Re-examination of the Role Plants Play in the Iliad"

2023-24 UofT Classics Literature Stream Seminars

Plant-based Poetics? A Re-examination of the Role Plants Play in the Iliad
Jeff Masse (Ph.D. Student, University of Toronto)

Speaker Bio
Jeff completed his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Classics, with a minor in Philosophy, at the University of Windsor in 2015. After this, he completed his Master of Arts in Classics with a specialization in Text and Culture, at Brock University in 2018. During this time he completed a Major Research Project entitled “The Iliad’s Social Network: Speech Performance and Heroic Community.” In this project he built a network graph from the direct speech interactions expressed in the narrative present of the Iliad. He applied concepts of Social Network Analysis to this graph in order to identify the heroic speech communities the Iliad constructs. This allowed him to explore how the Homeric hero, a muthõn rheter (Il. 9. 443), employs speech to situate himself among other performers of speech acts. His current research interests fit broadly within the study of Archaic and Classical Greek literature, including: ancient conceptions of speech and language, the functional semantics of the ancient Greek language, the poetics of Homer, Greek lyric, the Pre-Socratics, and Tragedy, and Plato in his cultural context.