Studies of Homer

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsLocal PurposeHumanities

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Passage

While a new surge of critical interest in the ancient Greek poems conventionally ascribed to Homer has taken place in the last twenty years or so, it was nonspecialists rather than professional scholars who studied the poetic aspects of the Iliad and the Odyssey between, roughly, 1935 and 1970. During these years, critics “are rather Philosophical, Historical, Geographical . . . or rather anything than Critical and Poetical.”

Ironically, the modern manifestation of this “nonpoetical” emphasis can be traced to the profoundly influential work of Milman Parry, who attempted to demonstrate in detail how the Homeric poems, believed to have been recorded nearly three thousand years ago, were the products of a long and highly developed tradition of oral poetry scholars away from the poems into the rapidly developing field of Homer’s archaeological and historical background.

Appropriately, Milman Parry’s son Adam was among those scholars responsible for a renewed interest in Homer’s poetry as literary art. Building on his father’s work, the younger Parry argued that the Homeric poems exist both within and against a tradition. The Iliad and the Odyssey were, Adam Parry thought, the beneficiaries of belief in a strong inherited tradition, but also by emphasizing Homer’s unique contributions within that tradition.

What this question is testing

Local Purpose

Your task

Identify why the author included the referenced detail at that point in the passage — its function, not its content.

Common trap

Answers that merely repeat or summarize the topic of the detail instead of describing the role it plays.

Winning move

Ask what job the detail does for the paragraph, then for the passage's broader point.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question

11.

The author of the passage most probably quotes Alexander Pope (highlighted passage)

Answer choices

Wrong Emphasis8% picked this
indicate that the Homeric poems have generally received poor treatment at the hands
The point of the Pope quote is to indicate that critics have generally done a bad job of confining themselves to actually critiquing the content / form / style of the works themselves. They get tangled up with peripheral concerns instead. This has nothing to do specifically with Homer.
8%
Out of Scope17% picked this
prove that poets as well as critics have emphasized elements peripheral
Out of Scope: poets, just like critics The point of the Pope quote is to indicate that critics have generally done a bad job of confining themselves to the works themselves. They get tangled up with peripheral concerns instead. It had nothing to do with poets being guilty of the same crime.
17%
Correct68% picked this
illustrate that the nonpoetical emphasis also existed in an
Why this is right
The point of the Pope quote is to indicate that critics have generally done a bad job of confining themselves to the works themselves. They get tangled up with peripheral concerns instead. Another way to talk about this is to say that instead of focusing on the poetry itself, critics tend to focus on nonpoetical emphases. Quoting Pope is way to say, "This problem that afflicted Homer scholarship for a few decades is a typical thing we've seen from critics before, over the year. Critics, amirite?"
Skill tested: Local Purpose · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
68%
Wrong Emphasis1% picked this
emphasize the problems inherent in rendering classical Greek poetry into
The point of the Pope quote is to indicate that critics have generally done a bad job of confining themselves to the work itself. They focus on lots of side issues instead. This answer is saying Pope was brought up to emphasize that "it's hard to render classical Greek into modern English". That's not remotely close to what the previous sentence was talking about. This is just trying to trap students who look at the sentence we're being asked about rather than before the sentence we're being asked about. Is says "English" in this sentence, so let's write a trap answer based off that!
1%
Wrong Emphasis5% picked this
argue that poets and literary critics have seldom agreed about the
The point of the Pope quote is to indicate that critics get too distracted. They talk about side issues rather than actually critiquing / studying the poetry itself. The last two sentences of this paragraph aren't saying that poets and critics have very different interpretations of poetry. We could just support that poets and critics have very different interpretations of the role a literary critic should play. Critics seems to think that critics should talk about a penumbra of issues surrounding a text, and poets seem to think that critics should be talking about things that are central to the text.
5%

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