Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Literary Ontology of the Hermead

Literary Ontology of the Hermead

The Hermead of Surazeus, an epic about philosophers, is a multi-genre work of art that combines various approaches of literary ontology to present the lives and ideas of some of the most influential people in western civilization. The literary ontology of the Hermead combines all the traditions of literature that have been developed since the Iliad was composed and presents a coherent world view of the universe through tales of the human quest for wisdom.

On its face, the Hermead is an epic poem in the tradition of Homer and Vergil as it presents the actions and speeches of culturally important figures in classical narrative form. The stories of the Hermead are told in a straight linear depiction of the lives of various people in the ancient Homeric tradition of epic narrative story-telling.

The Hermead is a continuation of the Romantic tradition in that it presents the sacred quest of humanity for the truth about the nature of the world and mankind. The Hermead is a Bildungsroman in the sense that it presents the psychological growth of ancient philosophers as they embody the theme of spiritual education and gain wisdom on the nature of life through their investigation of its material objects.

The Hermead incorporates all the literary methods of the past several centuries as its tales progress through Modernism, Postmodernism, and Metamodernism. Many of the basic concepts of philosophy, science, and religion can be found as seeds in the tales of the Hermead.

The Hermead explores the ancient roots of our civilization that many felt were lost and destroyed when Modernism rejected the certainty of the Enlightenment and lamented the destruction of ancient traditions. While Modernists pick up fragments of literature in the shattered ruins of the cathedral of philosophy, bombed by modern technology, readers of the Hermead explore the vast labyrinth of narrative tales that are part of the reconstruction of the ancient temple of philosophy in one epic poem.

The Hermead follows Postmodernism as it articulates the perpetual state of incompleteness and promotes the idea of radical pluralism that there are many ways of knowing the truth about the world as the tales of the Hermead deconstruct the process of development in the ancient search for truth about the nature of things. The Hermead presents particular individuals through literary Realism as Nominal exemplars of the universal Archetype of the Wise Man.

The Hermead engages in the aesthetics of Metamodernism as its tales oscillate between the rejection of the one tradition in Modernism and the restoration of multiple traditions in Postmodernism through presentation of the basic concepts developed by ancient philosophers that form the foundation of the civilization which has grown and transformed over the past three millennia.

The Hermead is constructed with tools from various poetic schools such as Conceptualism since the tales are all founded on the concept of the human quest for truth in the nature of the world, so all the various concepts and legends about ancient philosophers are gathered from disparate sources and assembled together in a series of tales to present the development of philosophy in a coherent narrative.

Stories about philosophers are either complicated academic books focused on their philosophy, or short children's books that simplify events and ideas of their lives. The Hermead stakes a literary medium as its tales elevate their achievements of their heroes to the level of classical epic by presenting all their stories together in epic blank verse, presenting philosophy through dramatic narrative tales of literary art.

Great epics of the past, such as the Iliad, Odyssey, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Aeneid, Divine Comedy, The Fairie Queene, and Paradise Lost, presented human characters as struggling against powerful conscious forces in nature that were anthropomorphized as gods, whereas the Hermead presents in realistic stories human characters investigating and comprehending the processes of nature and psychological perception, and how this new-gained knowledge can guide our actions through ethical analysis, in a universe that is entirely natural and not controlled by conscious gods.

The Hermead is an epic poem that presents the History of Science in the earliest days of its development from ancient philosophy in the classical age of Greece and Rome, and thus explores the socio-psychological development of mankind by using the structure of Historical Fiction to transform mysterious figures in the history of western civilization into living human beings whose ideas form the foundation of our entire ontological world view.

The core concept of the Hermead is the nature of things. All things are structures of atoms. Construction is structure coming together, and destruction is structure coming apart. Our conscious actions cause processes of change that involve construction and destruction. Once we understand, through study of physics, chemistry, and socio-psychology, how structures assemble and dissolve, we can evaluate the chain of reaction through processes of cause and effect that lead to and from a particular situation,  and then decide what action will be constructive or destructive. The Hermead presents one particular answer to the to-be-or-not-to-be dilemma of Hamlet.

In composing the Hermead as a epic poem of historical fiction that presents the lives of philosophers, I had great fun wearing their faces as masks and exploring how they might have lived and how that process of living might have inspired the key ideas each philosopher provided that became the foundation stones on which we have constructed our civilization.

We are explorers sitting around a campfire at night, experiencing the tales of the Hermead as we listen to the poet recite the tales of great cultural heroes who went beyond the perimeter of our village and returned from the underworld with enlightening concepts about the nature of the world.

Book Page: http://FaceBook.com/Hermead

Editions of the Hermead for sale: http://tinyurl.com/HermeadEditions

#Epic #Poetry #Quest #Bildungsroman #Romanticism #Modernism #PostModernism #MetaModernism #Conceptualism #HistoricalFiction #HistoryOfScience #Realism #Novel #WesternCivilization

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