Abstract
The starting point for the following reflections is provided by the theses of media and cultural theorist Friedrich Kittler, according to whom the poet Homer was the founder of the revolutionary cultural innovation of vowel notation in ancient Greek writing. The ability to render vowels in writing, he argues, was the true birth of Europe from the spirit of grammatology.
This interpretation has recently been refuted by German scholar and cultural historian Klaus Theweleit, with his speculative deduction of vowel notation from the spirit of Aegean navigation.
Against the backdrop of the hermetic quarrel between scholars, this lesson will shed light on a few aspects of English-, French- and Spanish-speaking globalization at the start of the digital revolution in the Gutenberg era.
