We're going to start our discussion of poetry in Western Europe with the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two great poems stand out as great examples of the earliest Europeans poems. They are believed to have been written sometime between 800BC and 700BC, partly because the poems refer to the social conditions of that time, conditions that have been validated by the findings of archeologists. But just who was the poet who laid down these cornerstones of west-em literature? Tradition ascribes them to a man named Homer, but we know virtually nothing about this Homer. In fact, some say that such a poet never existed at all, that neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey was written by a single poet,but rather each poem is composed of the writings of several people. This, anyway, is the view of a school of literary critics in the 18th century known as the Analysts. The Analysts pointed to internal evidence such as variations in the literary devices used in the poem to argue that each work as in fact a collection of several poems by several Greek authors. Opposing the analysts were a second group of scholars called the Unitarian. They insisted that the Iliad and the Odyssey could weldthe work of single poetic genius. To support their argument, they stress among other things the consistency of the character portrayed in the poetry. This wouldn't have been possible, they said, if they were written by many different poets. Now how we look at the Homeric question today has been greatly influenced by someone named Milkman Parry, an American scholar who first presented his ideas about Homer in the 1930s. So let's take a look at Parry' s research and how it affects what modem day scholars think about Homer.
解析
What aspect of the Iliad and the Odyssey does the professor mainly discuss?
主旨题。教授提到But just who was the poet who laid down these cornerstones of western literature?即“但是谁是(写了《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》.那位诗人，谁是西方文学的奠基石?”由此可知本文讨论的是《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》的作者到底是谁。因此，正确答案为B。