Special Episode – Storylife with Professor Joel P. Christensen

We are thrilled to sit down in conversation with Professor Joel P. Christensen to discuss some of the ideas explored in his forthcoming book Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Yale University Press).

Special Episode – Storylife with Professor Joel P. Christensen

Joel Christensen is Professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He received his BA and MA from Brandeis in Classics and English and holds a PhD in Classics from New York University. His publications include A Beginner’s Guide to Homer (2013), A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice with Erik Robinson (2018), Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts with Elton T. E. Barker (2019),  and The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic (2020). 

Professor Christensen is also famous online for his engaging work on ancient Greece and Rome through his website sententiaeantiquae.com

In this episode we delve into some of the ideas that Christensen explores in his forthcoming book Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Yale University Press). With chapters exploring Homer in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic and people’s response to it, particularly in the context of the United States.

Things to listen out for

• The power of epic poetry to have therapeutic benefits
• Biological analogies for the considering the life of narratives
• Approaching our understanding of the world and the affairs of people with generosity
• The Homeric Question(s)
• The dangers of the God-Author model when considering written texts
• On the significant differences between oral approaches to authority and written approaches to authority
• The arboreal metaphor for thinking of the Iliad and the Odyssey as objects
• Epic poetry and DNA (and some of the poetic meter!)
• The challenges of language whether its epic poetry or just going to language class
• The problem with Greek heroes and the protective nature of epic poetry
• The opportunity for ‘rehumanisation’ that comes from engaging with stories
• A call for an education revolution!

The cover for Storylife

It’s All Greek to Me!

Keen on the Ancient Greek recited by Professor Christensen in this episode?

He recites the opening line of the Iliad:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

which can be found online at Perseus.

And he also cites the first line of the Odyssey:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

which can also be found online at Perseus.

Books (and film) mentioned

• Barbara Graziosi 2002. Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge University Press )
• Ruth Finnegan 1979. Oral Poetry: Its nature, significance and social context (Cambridge University Press)
• Walter J. Ong 2012. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge)
• Rebecca Huntley 2020. How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference (Allen & Unwin)
• Cook, E. (1998). ‘Heroism, Suffering, and Change’ in D. Boedeker (Ed.), The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Real World: Proceedings from a Seminar Sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage and Held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., on March 6-7, 1998 (pp. 47-63). Washington D.C.: Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage.
• Film: 2040 by Damon Gameau, released in 2019

Music Credits

Our music is composed by the amazing Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Lightly edited for the Latin and our wonderful Australian accents!

Dr G 0:15
Welcome to The Partial Historians.

We explore all the details of ancient Rome.

Everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr Rad.

And I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Welcome everybody to a very special episode of The Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr G.

And I am Dr Rad.

And we are super thrilled today to be welcoming a special guest, Professor JoelChristiensen. Now, Joel Christiensen is professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He received his BA and MA from Brandeis in classics and English, and holds a PhD in classics from New York University, and has many exciting publications in his back catalog, including ‘A Beginner’s guide to Homer’, ‘A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice’ with Eric Robinson, ‘Homer’s Thebes’ with Elton T. E. Barker and ‘The Many-Minded Man:The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic’. Also, Professor Christensen is famous online for his engaging work on ancient Greece and Rome through his website, which I’m about to mispronounce, sententiaeantiquae.com

Yup, you stuff that up completely.

I did. Somebody correct me, please. Somebody correct me.

Sententiae, I think.

See, there you go. It’s easy. Just don’t rely on me for pronouncing things. So you could say, from this back catalog that we are incredibly starstruck and also completely out of our death, because we are Roman historians. And you will have noticed that Professor Christensen is really a Greek specialist in all of these sorts of areas that he’s focused on in his work. And we are going to be really junior learners in this process of this interview, which we’re excited about as we talk about Professor Christensen’s forthcoming book, ‘Storylife: On Epic Narrative and Living Things’, which is coming out in 2025 through Yale University Press. So thank you, Joel, so much for joining us.

Professor Joel Christensen 2:57
Hey, thank you for inviting me. I was so psyched when you guys sent that email, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr G 3:03
Fantastic. Woo hoo. I’m glad that the excitement is mutual, because we’re definitely starstruck. So this is, this is thrilling stuff. So to start off with, thinking about story life, in the preface, you say that this is an exploration of how we think about stories if we externalize them. And I’m wondering if you can take us a little bit about what led you to this idea to consider stories as external agents.

Speaker 1 3:31
Yeah, so I mean, what’s probably connected and animated my work, in fact, my interest in scholarship, since I was, I don’t know, middle school is thinking about how stories function in the world, why we respond to them so much, why we care about them and really like how we depend on them and what they do. And so, you know, for many years, in teaching myth, I, you know, grasp about for different metaphors and how to think about getting people to understand why makes vary, why stories are embedded in different contexts, and what similarities and differences from one context to another means. And at the same time, while I was doing this, I have been, as you note in the introduction, sort of habitually online, watching everything that’s happened in Twitter and Facebook since it started, I’m, you know, I feel like I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to remember a world before Google and before Facebook. In fact, both debuted while I was in graduate school, and you really got a sense of watching them unfold, of how much faster narratives were moving and changing, and how they could really make people act in different ways. And so part of it is, for me, I’ve always felt sort of on the outside of what we might see as American centrism and what we do in the world. To go back again to around the time Google debuted, I was in New York City for 911. I was there for the peace protest. And you know, I lost friends and, like, ruined family relationships. Because from the beginning, I didn’t understand why a terrorist attack in the US meant we should be going on an endless war and terror and, you know, invading Afghanistan, Iraq, all of those things. And so constantly, you know, I was interested in rhetoric, in politics. And then, you know, post the 2008 election and Obama, I got really interested in the way that stories shape our notion by identity and belonging to larger groups. And so that’s a very long answer for your f