Aristotle's Lost Homeric Problems

2013

Widely revered as the father of Western literature, Homer was the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the epic poems which immortalised such names as Achilles, Cyclops, Menelaus, and Helen of Troy. In this vivid introduction, Elton Barker and Joel Christensen celebrate the complexity, innovation and sheer excitement of Homer’s two great works, and investigate the controversy surrounding the man behind the myths – asking who he was and whether he even existed.

Oral Tradition, 2003

Unforrected Proofs. Forthcoming in a special issue of /Ramus/ ed. S. Lindheim and H. Morales. A discussion of recent editions of, and approaches to, the Homeric text. An argument for the importance of attending to matters of sound, performance, and reception when assessing Homeric language, and editing the text.

Ph.D. thesis, Comparative Literature Program, University of Geneva, 2002, 335 p.

The thesis presents a comparison between two characteristically divergent approaches to the issue of the readability of ancient literature. Only the first approach concerns Homer directly, as it is the one of modern philology and its historicist reformulation of the Homeric Question, inaugurated by Friedrich August Wolf’s neo-Latin Prolegomena ad Homerum (Prolegomena to Homer), first published in 1795 (Part A of the thesis). The other approach that I discuss in detail, is Walter Benjamin’s critique of the historicist configuration of art and literature, as developed in his early writings (Part B). Benjamin deals with the issue of readability of literature from a general theoretical perspective, the focus of which is no longer the philological reformation of originals, but the translatability of their formations. The perspective, which has been qualified by Benjamin as that of a “metaphysics of form”, explicitly connects to metaphysical notions and problematics, in a way that not only undoes historicist premises, but also resists deconstructionist alternatives. The comparison between Wolf and Benjamin is based on the fact that the notion of form comes to play in both. This leads me to the formulation of a number of propositions and remarks concerning the readability and translatability of Homeric literatures in our present moment (Parts C and D). The first part of the thesis begins with a close reading of Wolf’s Prolegomena. Chapter A.1 discusses this work as paradigmatically historicist: it anticipates and exemplifies the development of nineteenth-century German historicism, inviting us to rethink the corresponding theoretical and methodological premises concerning the relations between historical and textual form. My discussion Includes an overview, in chapter A.4, of the philological debate on the Homeric Question throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part of the thesis centres on Benjamin’s essay on translation: “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers [The task of the translator]”, originally published in 1923. Systematic attention is also given to other essays, the writing of which is situated within the same early period of Benjamin’s work. I closely examine, in particular, “Erkenntniskritische Vorrede”, the epistemological-critical preface to his work on the origins of the German drama (Die Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels). I also insist on the posthumously published “Über Sprache Überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen [On language in general and on the language of the human]“. I read these essays as conjoined and multifaceted attempts to rethink history outside historicism, humanness outside anthropology, language outside linguistics – that is to say, essence outside ontology and phenomena outside phenomenology. My reading includes de Man’s approach to Benjamin in his 1983 lecture entitled “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The task of the Translator’”. I insist on notions such as those of history and humanness – figures that de Man is too eager to contain on the grounds of his all-encompassing configuration of language. An excursus through Aristotle’s Categories intends to expose, against a supplementary background, the specificity of Benjamin’s problematics about form. I underscore, in this respect, Benjamin’s notion of literary formation (Gebilde), which he seems to prefer systematically to that of text, and which displaces historicist problematics of cultural form (Bildung). The third part of the thesis begins by presenting, in chapter C.1, the epistemological implications of Benjaminian problematics, especially with respect to the question of categories designating essential and non-essential attributes of literary formations. Ideational form stands between the formational substance of a literary work and its purely human-linguistic essence – no further categories being pertinent as to the essence of the formation in question. In other words, characteristics pertaining to historical positioning would not pertain to the essence of literary texts. In chapter C.2 I suggest that the Homeric Question be somewhat reformulated: instead of asking what text would be properly Homeric, one could ask what kind of thing Homer could be, given the entire range of the written constructs that enact its formation. I then address the question of the extent and variance of the semiotic material through which Homer persists, today, as a readable original. Chapter C.3 discusses two different cases of non-Wolfian approaches to the readability and translatability of the Homeric formation. The first, cursorily addressed, is that of the twelfth-century Byzantine exegesis of Eustathius of Thessaloniki. The second is the post-philological reading of what has come to be called the “oral theory” of Homer and has somewhat displaced the Wolfian paradigm since the 1960s. Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales and Berkeley Peabody’s Winged Word posit the readability of Homer beyond the confines of Wolfian principles of textual formness. Their insights, I suggest, pertain less to the historical or pseudo-historical question of the oral and traditional nature of original Homeric poetry, than to the specific challenge presented to the contemporary reader by the kind of writing that makes up our Homeric vulgate. The last part of the thesis discusses de Man’s resistance to Benjamin’s position on the issue of theology. Chapter D.1 turns to a text by Vladimir Lossky, concerning the use of the theological notion of prosopon for an understanding of the human1. I probe the pertinence of this notion with respect to the theoretical problem of literary form and readability. The closing chapter D.2 ventures to conclude on the specificity of the Homeric prosopon: the heroic epos would be a mode of indexing humanness as linguistic and historic – a mode always remaining to recollect.

Museum Sinicum, 2018

New Directions in Oral Theory (Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005) 43-89

In the very fertile field of Homeric Studies there were published in this, the last year of the 20th century, more than a dozen new dissertations, two dozen new scholarly books and monographs, and over 250 new articles and reviews in scholarly journals-a total of almost 10,000 pages of text (and that does not include reprints, translations, popular literature, conference talks, or the ever-growing corpus of electronic text on the World Wide Web). 1 From the last decade of the 20th century I have personally collected more than 2,200 titles of new books, monographs, and journal articles-a total of over 60,000 pages of text (and I must be missing at least a few!). I estimate that in the last century around a half-million new pages of scholarly text were printed; this adds up to 460 pages of commentary for each page of Homeric text, including the "Homeric" Hymns! And this has gone on year after year for at least the last two centuries, and, though sometimes with somewhat less enthusiasm and prolificacy, for twenty-four centuries before that. There is a very present danger that we as Homeric scholars will fail to keep up with all the new discoveries and insights in our field as a whole. This is inevitable, and we recognize it. We do well if we can manage the bibliographical searching tools for the material published during the 20th century, if we have a grasp of the general flow of scholarship during the 19th, and if we can access and comprehend the commentaries on Homer that have survived from earlier centuries (from the Alexandrian hypomnemata whose vestiges are embedded in the Homeric scholia, to Eustathius' magna opera on both epics, to Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum). Some new and even important discoveries in the field will pass many of us by. But there is another danger, I think, more sinister than this one: that the ever rising inundation of new material will cause us to drift away from those moorings established by the toilsome research of our predecessors. I propose to offer here not something entirely new and imaginative, not something more to add to the mass of material to be mastered, but simply a reminder of some of those moorings from which we seem to have lost our grasp.

Homer: The Very Idea, 2021

Invention/Reception of Homer from antiquity to the present

The Wednesday, 2022

You'll find my short paper on pages 3 to 6 of the WEDNESDAY, issue no. 172. The Homeric poems (the Iliad and the Odyssey) had a powerful influence on ancient Greek civilization, if not the whole of humankind. Many find this statement to be true but do little to examine it. I propose to reopen Homer’s case to show how the poems established themselves within their culture and gained a widespread circulation in ancient Greek society. Their appearance and diffusion are much more significant than commonly believed. Why? Because they were able to portray a sort of society (and of Olympus) that was astonishingly 'modern'. Just one example could be supplied here: Nausicaa thinks something and says something different, helpful in view of what she thought or considered. This distance between thought (eventually wished) and actually said enacts a dialectic totally unexpected in those old times).

“Poet and historian: the impact of Homer in Herodotus’ Histories”, in I.Matjiašić (ed.), Herodotus – The Most Homeric Historian? (Histos Supplement 14: Oxford, Edmonton & Tallahassee), 287-374.

which took place in March , where most of the chapters that make up the book were presented. The conference was funded by the Research Committee of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle, and by the Institute of Classical Studies in London. I wish to express my gratitude to both institutions for their generous support, to the speakers for accepting my invitation to Newcastle, to the other numerous participants for a successful and fruitful discussion during the event, and to the chairs of each session: Federico Santangelo, Rowland Smith, Christopher Tuplin, and Jaap Wisse. I also wish to thank the Histos editors, Rhiannon Ash and Timothy Rood, for accepting this edited book for publication in the journal's Supplements, and especially the supervisory editor of the Supplements, John Marincola, for the extremely helpful guidance and valuable assistance in the final stages of the publication process. Each chapter is autonomous and includes a self-standing bibliography, but all have benefitted from discussion during the conference and from subsequent exchanges of emails and texts. The Covid-pandemic has certainly made our work more challenging, especially because of limited access to libraries, but we hope that our efforts have produced something that will benefit Herodotean and Homeric scholars. If the book manages to stimulate further thoughts or provoke some constructive reaction, it will have accomplished its principal objective.