For Friday's class, we might dip back into some of the poems from the previous sections, so let's only add one more section: "Her Girls and Family" (pp.33-53).
We'll do another writing in class on Friday, focusing more on the differences of translation, particularly between rhyme and free verse. Here are some other ideas to consider which might come up:
* How does Sappho define or complicate a "woman's" experience of life? For the Greeks, women were in the background--they couldn't own property or be citizens, being only a step up from slaves. How do the women seem to look at the own lives? As less than? Equal to? Different? The same?
* Culler reminds us in Chapter 2 that "Language resists the frames we impose...there is resistance in the language; we have to work on it, worth with it." How is this especially true for Sappho's poems?
* According to these poems, what kinds of relationships did women enjoy with one another? Are these all poems celebrating (or lamenting) sexual relationships? How might some of these poems expand or challenge the latter-day definition of "lesbian"?
* In Chapter 5, Culler writes that "The hyperbolic demand that the universe hear you and act accordingly is a move by which speakers constitute themselves as sublime poets or as visionary." To invoke the gods is a kind of hyperbole, too, even if you more or less expected a response. How literal should we take these invocations to Aphrodite, Eros, etc? Do you feel these are literal poems to various supernatural forces (from Sappho), or are they metaphors and character sketches, meant to be read as poetry, rather than as a diary or a request?
* How do these poems give us a sense of the poet's identity, even if she is hiding behind characters and situations? What themes predominate for her? What makes the typical Sapphic poem?
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