Pointing at the Past ― From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics

Homeric epic is concerned with the past. Its heroes are larger than life and accomplish their exploits in a bygone age outside the reach of ordinary mortals. Yet epic is not only a nostalgic memory of a remote past, but also, as performance, a deliberate act in the present. In fact, as this book argues, memory is itself a deliberate act when it is turned into epic language. With numerous fresh linguistic observations the author shows that the epic narrator makes the epic past come to the present: epic is not only a verbal artifact that points to the past: it also is a performer's act of pointing at a past that has become present in and through language. Building on his earlier work, Bakker demonstrates the power of discourse analysis, in this case a detailed analysis of the language of "deixis" as an essential tool for elucidating the poetics of the Homeric tradition. The book deals with such varied topics as epic formulas, grammatical tense, and the celebrated "vividness" of the Homeric poems.

Egbert J. Bakker is Professor of Classics at Yale University.