2026 Theses Doctoral

Skin Deep: Bodily Representations and Surface Poetics in Homer, Hesiod and the Theognidea

Stine, Brett L.

In this dissertation, I explore how bodily surfaces prove meaningful in their material and social relationships across the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and the Theognidea. Surfaces often move from the background to the foreground of texts through the mutable, affective potentials of the body.

As sites of interpretation, bodily surfaces are bound up with the cultural poetics of gender, status, and class, as well as the poetics of archaic Greek performance genres. I employ close reading while drawing from critical scholarship on affectivity and embodiment to explain how bodily surfaces interact with their social, political, and material environments.

I argue that mutable bodily surfaces are situated as meaningful touchstones across Greek poetic traditions and serve as shifting indices of archaic sociality. In particular the language of praise and blame stands out as both regularly “adhere to” or “manifest upon” bodies in ways that prove especially salient. Moreover, surface effects emerge as distinctive in their gendered, material, and generic affiliations.

In this regard, my study contributes to the field of genre studies as well as the history of the body, precisely by tracing how bodily surfaces served as physical, social, and cultural sites for the negotiation, reification, and performance of archaic Greek identities and their politics.