TAPA

summary:

While the Iliad is dominated by towering characters and elaborate artifacts, it is a world equally filled with tiny matter: the dust and sand that form the backdrop of heroic exploits. This paper illuminates the powerful role that these substances occupy in human life. Boundless in quantity and infinitely mutable, this material serves to visualize the limits of the human body and intellect. Equally important is the connection between these substances and human destruction: contact with dust and sand is tantamount to contact with death, a disintegration that epic language works to assuage through its own weightiness and perpetual preservation.