Content and Form

Abstract

Abstract The Iliad prompts immersion by focusing on the characters’ inner lives. Mind reading is one way we delve into inner lives, and the scholarly propensity to mind read the Iliad’s characters suggests the ubiquity of this kind of engagement among recipients. Conversely, the Iliad prompts immersion by leading audience members to think about themselves (self-referencing) and their own memories. Similarly, audience members’ knowledge of the poet’s compositional mechanisms, from formula to scripts, helps them feel immersed. Immersion can also arise not just in relation to the storyworld but in response to the formal components of the poetry. The numerous studies of the formal aspects of Homeric poetry should be aligned with this observation.