Hour 1 has four separate (two-part) annotation questions. To complete an Annotation Exercise in this course, hover your mouse over each highlighted portion of the focus text. When the Instructor prompt appears, read the question and click "Reply to Annotation." This will take you to a two-part task: an open-ended response question, and a question that will be answered by choosing one of multiple semantic tags.
Each of these exercises, one per hour, is meant to improve your understanding of the given text (in this case, Hour 1 Text C) by helping you analyze the context after you finish your slow reading of the text. But these exercises of annotation after slow reading do much more than that. They will build up your ability to understand not only the context but also [[1]] all other texts that contain similar contexts and [[2]] all the texts you will be reading in general. I can make this big promise because the texts that you are analyzing are part of a system, and the systematic thinking that went into the original texts can be decoded by analyzing the building blocks of the system. The way you analyze these building blocks is by trying to figure out how they are connected to the other building blocks in the system. That is what these annotation exercises are all about: they help you figure out the connections. And the more things you figure out, the more mental connections you can make on your own. But the exercise of making such connections through your annotations is a gradual process, and you need to be patient with yourself. You will get better and better at it, I am sure. The more connections you are able to make, the more powerful will be your reading ability. That is the beauty of analyzing something that was created by way of systematic thinking in an ancient tradition that took many centuries to develop (I estimate at least ten centuries). The tradition actually helps you think about the tradition. It will help you figure things out.
By now you have seen that I really like the expression figure out: it puts the emphasis on reading out of the text, not into the text. When you read into the text, you lose sight of the system that had built that text.
In the next exercise, I will switch metaphors in describing the system that had built the text. In the present exercise, I have been using the metaphor of building a structure with building blocks. In the next exercise I will start using the metaphor of weaving a fabric.
(Here is a working definition of metaphor: it is an expression of meaning where one thing is substituted for another thing. For example, when we use the metaphor “thread of thought,” the idea of a thread, as used by someone who is weaving or sewing, is substituted for the idea of a way of thinking. For another example: when Nietzsche speaks about reading with delicate fingers, the idea of a goldsmith touching gold is substituted for the idea of reading a text with the eyes.)
The main goal of this first exercise is to start practicing the art of slow reading. The best way to make a start, I think, is to read a story within a story. The inner story in this exercise is the story of the hero Hēraklēs, as retold by Agamemnon and as quoted by “Homer” in lines 78-138 of Iliad XIX. The outer story is the story of the Iliad itself, as retold by “Homer.”
So the story within a story is 60 lines long, while the story of the Iliad itself is over 15,000 lines long. Your task in this exercise is to do a close reading of the short story of 60 lines, which is embedded in the long story of the Iliad.
You can perform this task even if you haven’t started reading the Iliad, since I can summarize for you all 15,000+ lines of this huge epic in just three sentences here:
Now that you have the “big picture” of the Iliad as the outer story, you can have a very interesting experience as you do your slow reading of the inner story, contained in the 60 lines spoken by Agamemnon and telling the story of Hēraklēs.
Here is something to keep in mind. The research of the great literary critic I. A. Richards, who was once a professor at Harvard University (he retired in 1963 and died in 1979), shows that the relationship of any kind of an outer story to any kind of an inner story is not necessarily a “one-way street,” as it were, leading from the outer into the inner story: there can also be a “two-way street,” with the inner story communicating with the outer story as well as the other way around. Where I use the expressions “outer story” and “inner story,” Richards used the terms “tenor” and “vehicle.” I have always found those terms rather forbidding, but, as you see, they stand for things that are fairly easy to explain.
|76 Then Agamemnon, the king of men, spoke up at their meeting, |77 right there from the place where he was sitting, not even standing up in the middle of the assembly. |78 “Near and dear ones,” said he, “Danaan [= Achaean] heroes, attendants [therapontes] of Arēs! |79 It is a good thing to listen when a man stands up to speak, and it is not seemly |80 to speak in relay after him. It would be hard for someone to do that, even if he is a practiced speaker. |81 For how could any man in an assembly either hear anything when there is an uproar |82 or say anything? Even a public speaker who speaks clearly will be disconcerted by it. |83 What I will do is to make a declaration addressed to [Achilles] the son of Peleus. As for the rest of you |84 Argives [= Achaeans], you should understand and know well, each one of you, the words [mūthos] that I say for the record. |85 By now the Achaeans have been saying these words [mūthos] to me many times, |86 and they have been blaming me. But I am not responsible [aitios]. |87 No, those who are really responsible are Zeus and Fate [Moira] and the Fury [Erinys] who roams in the mist.
Iliad XIX 76-138