Elizabeth Minchin
Biographic Data
| ID | 5627030 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth Minchin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth |
| FAMILY NAME | Minchin |
| SIGNATURE | MINCHIN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9943-3612 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 58 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1896 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Homer’s Living Language
Emotions, Memory, and the Wrath of Achilles
Psychology tells us that when one's emotions are aroused the vividness and completeness of one's memory for an event is enhanced. But the impact of emotion has negative effects too. Psychologists have studied a phenomenon described as "narrowing of attention": under certain circumstances emotion promotes memory for details central to an emotion-laden event at the expense of details at the periphery. The Iliadic Achilles is an interesting case-stu…
Visualizing the Shield of Achilles
My investigation into the cognitive aspects of landscape description takes as its focus the landscapes that the poet evokes on the Shield of Achilles ( Il. 18.478–608). Drawing on studies in cognitive psychology I note the extent to which an audience might derive a ‘spatial mental model’ from the topographical or ‘locative’ indicators that the Homeric poet offers. Then I consider the ‘non-locative’ information that the poet conveys about the land…
Homeric Religion
The epics that are associated with Homer’s name, the Iliad and the Odyssey , emerge from a long tradition of oral song that extends back into the Late Bronze Age. The poems themselves, however, date from the late 8th or early 7th centuries bc . From the perspective of religious belief and religious practice, the society that is described in these epics, like the society of the 8th- and 7th-century Aegean world, is a polytheistic society: the hero…
Odysseus, Emotional Intelligence, and the Plot of the Odyssey
It is well recognized amongst psychologists that individuals exhibit not one but multiple intelligences (Gardner 1993). Perhaps the most conspicuous of these, especially in interpersonal contexts, is emotional intelligence: that ability to understand and predict one’s own emotions, and those of others, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and behaviour (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso 2008). Although the Odyssean Odysseus is known for hi…
Mapping the Hellespont with Leander and Hero
This chapter explores through the lens of memory studies in a variety of fields the intimate relationship between the story of Hero and Leander and its setting on the Hellespont. It draws on research in cognitive and social psychology on the way in which features of the landscape serve as prompts for the recollection of other material, a study from archaeology of the phenomenology of landscape, and recent work on the operations of collective memo…
Voice and Voices
The primary narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which we associate with the voice of the poet, are elaborated and enhanced by a number of other tales, secondary narratives that are in almost every case spoken by one or another of the storyteller's characters. There has been abundant discussion of the content of secondary tales of this thematic kind, especially those of the Iliad, and their relationship to the story proper. I shall use this w…
Repetition in Homeric epic
Why are there so many instances - and so many varieties - of repetition in the oral epics that we associate with Homer's name? In this paper I begin with Deborah Tannen's observations on repetition in spontaneous conversational discourse. I then turn to the oral epic tradition that had flourished in early Greece to consider how repetition operates in its two representative poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey
Remembering Leander
The story of Hero and Leander has been remembered across time both on account of \nits powerful themes, of love and death, and on account of its setting. Even today the \nstory is not forgotten. The young lovers are remembered each year in a swimming \ncompetition held on the Hellespont, near Sestos and Abydos, the towns associated \nwith their names. This article traces the history of the tale’s transmission and \nreception from the end of the B…
Poet, Audience, Time, and Text
When oral theory first was developed and applied from within classical studies in the 1930s attention was focused primarily on the Homeric texts and their so-called formulaic language: scholars considered the nature of the formula and its role and function in oral traditional poetry, always from the poet's perspective.1 Over the last 80 years the assumption has been that the mode (oral presentation) and the medium (the spoken word) limit, or othe…
Translation' and Transformation
Alice Oswald's, Memorial, an 'excavation' of the Iliad, is a response to that ancient account of the grief and pain that is inevitably the outcome of war. Oswald herself describes the poem as an 'oral cemetery'. Borrowing some of the most conspicuous of Homer's traditional epic elements - his lists, biographies, and smiles - and blending paraphrase and translation, Oswald has re-worked this early epic, creating a poem for today's world. This pape…
Memory and Memories
Ring Composition
Andromache
Catalogues
Speech Introductions
Memory
Arming‐Scenes
Speech‐Act Theory
Orality, Literacy and Performance in the Ancient World
The Words Of Gods
In this paper, the author presents, from the social perspective of discourse analysis, an account of how the gods communicate with each other using the language that they share with mortals. The Iliad contains remnants of what is claimed to be a divine language which is not completely different from that of men. Discourse analysis, a relatively new discipline, studies the ways in which people use language to communicate. There are several sustain…
Nestor
Themes’ and ‘Mental Moulds’
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The Expression of Sarcasm in the Odyssey
I begin with a survey of relevant literature on sarcastic talk as it occurs in the anglophone world today. Having developed a 'view' of sarcasm in this contemporary world, I turn to the expression of sarcasm in Homer. My examination of the spoken exchanges in the second half of the Odyssey reveals many features in common with sarcastic talk in the contemporary world. I go on to demonstrate that the poet has used sarcastic talk to shape character,…
From gentle teasing to heavy sarcasm
Homer and the Resources of Memory
How could a poet who worked in an oral tradition maintain the momentum of his song? How could a poet such as Homer weave a tale which filled an evening or, perhaps, a whole long night? The answer lies in memory, as we have known. But this bald explanation does not do justice either to the complexity of memory or to the richness of the Homeric epics. Now that so much more information has become available to us, from cognitive psychology and lingui…
Homeric Voices
I. DISCOURSE AND MEMORY 1. Speech acts in Homer: the rebuke as a case-study 2. On declining an invitation: context, form, and function 3. Questions in the Odyssey: rhythm and regularity 4. Hysteron proton in questions and answers 5. Verbal behaviour in its social context: three question strategies in the Odyssey II. DISCOURSE AND GENDER 6. Linguistic choices in Homer: rebukes and protests 7. Competitive and co-operative strategies I: information …
From gentle teasing to heavy sarcasm
Translation' and Transformation
Alice Oswald's, Memorial, an 'excavation' of the Iliad, is a response to that ancient account of the grief and pain that is inevitably the outcome of war. Oswald herself describes the poem as an 'oral cemetery'. Borrowing some of the most conspicuous of Homer's traditional epic elements - his lists, biographies, and smiles - and blending paraphrase and translation, Oswald has re-worked this early epic, creating a poem for today's world. This pape…
Verbal behaviour in its social context
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
LIII.— Suggestions for a natural classification of the Asconidæ
Speaker and Listener, Text and Context
Scripts and Themes
Peer-reviewed
The Performance of Lists and Catalogues in the Homeric Epics
Describing and Narrating in Homer's Iliad
Abbreviations
Homer ‘s Script for Storytelling
Homer calls upon his Muse, or the sisterhood of Muses, a number of times within the Iliad and once only-at the outset-in the Odyssey. In the invocations Which introduce each epic he asks the Muse to inspire his song; and in those which occur in the course of the Iliad he appeals for inspiration for a single segment or episode-the singing of the great Catalogue of Ships, or the song which describes a turn in battle. There has been considerable dis…
Dedication
The Story Format and the Generation of ‘Rings ‘
This chapter returns to a topic raised in my Introduction and developed in Chapter 3: the topic of memory expertise. There I discussed how we acquire expertise in routine tasks, ho ‘A ‘ we store information about those tasks in memory, and how we access it. As we have already observed, expertise of this kind is retained in procedural or implicit memory as a ‘table ‘ or a ‘format ‘: the format will provide a series of cues to action. This is so ev…
On Working under Pressure
The various lists and catalogues which are to be found in the Homeric epics have, over recent years, been subject to careful scrutiny. But although they have been studied individually in terms of both form and content, there has been no real discussion of the activity itself—the activity of listing and cataloguing—in traditional oral epic. Although scholars recognize that Homer’s lists and catalogues, like his narrative, are the products of an or…
Homer ‘s Descriptive Segments
On at least twenty occasions in the course of the Iliad Homer slows the flow of narrative and allows himself to dwell on an object in the possession of one of his characters. He asks us to envisage a goblet, a bowl, a robe, or a lyre and, for a few moments, to hold that image before our eyes. For the most part these objects are familiar, even mundane; they are the furniture of everyday living. But these items are also extraordinary, because we en…
Homer ‘s Typical Scenes
Vithin the Homeric epics it is possible to identify a number of ‘typical scenes ‘: action sequences such as contests, meals, journeys, visits, and funeral rites; procedures such as dressing, or harnessing horses; and, although they were not considered by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, various speech acts, such as rebukes, challenges, exhortations, prayers, and boasts. Parry and Lord referred to such stereotyped episodes as themes. In each of these…
Epilogue ‘Special’ Storytelling
Subject Ancient Greek History Textual Criticism Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Similes 1n Homer
In this chapter I examine from a cognitive perspective a typical if not a defining feature of the epics: the simile. My purpose is to draw into this discussion, which in the past has been for the most part descriptive or taxonomic, some evidence of a different kind. My principal preoccupations will be the interactive relationship between imagery, which is at the heart of the simile, and memory the way in which memory prompts an image, the way in …
Title Pages
Similes in Homer
How Homeric is Hysteron Proteron
It is now eighty years?we go back to a time which precedes the work of Milman Parry?since Samuel Bassett's article on hysteron proteron in Homer brought to readers' notice a remarkable device, an idiosyncracy of the poet's style.1) The term, generally speaking, refers to the poet's preference for spelling out within his song a twofold instruction, proposal, or question and in a subsequent passage reversing the original order of presentation. Bass…
Homer and the Resources of Memory
How could a poet who worked in an oral tradition maintain the momentum of his song? How could a poet such as Homer weave a tale which filled an evening or, perhaps, a whole long night? The answer lies in memory, as we have known. But this bald explanation does not do justice either to the complexity of memory or to the richness of the Homeric epics. Now that so much more information has become available to us, from cognitive psychology and lingui…
Speech Acts in the Everyday World and in Homer
Verbal behaviour in its social context
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Approaches to Homer, Ancient and Modern
Hysteron Proteron in Questions and Answers
This chapter studies a phenomenon first observed by Samuel Bassett in questions and answers in the Homeric epics: the poet's preference for spelling out a twofold instruction, proposal, or question, and in a subsequent passage reversing the original order of presentation. It discusses the ‘device’ in the context of the Odyssey. There are two findings: first, that this practice of answering questions in an order that reverses the order of asking i…
Competitive and Co-operative Strategies I
According to Jennifer Coates there are three characteristic modes in discourse of a dominant kind: information-questions, directives, and interruption. Information-questions are ostensibly designed to seek information, but may also be used (by virtue of their challenging nature) to establish power and status. In a co-operative style of discourse, on the other hand, information-questions are more likely to serve as an invitation to others to parti…
Verbal Behaviour in its Social Context
This chapter examines a selection of questions from the Odyssey in terms of their functions as social acts that may reflect, reinforce, or revise the social relationship of the speakers. The three categories identified by Esther Goody are deference-questions, control-questions, and counter-questions. Each of these forms acknowledges the power-relations between any speaker and his or her addressee, and illustrates the important links between verba…
Storytelling and Gender
This chapter examines stories from the world of Homer to observe whether Homer is consistent in his representation of gender differences in storytelling in respect of theme, content, and presentation. Homer's men tell longer stories and observe other markers of men's storytelling in the Western world of today. Women tell fewer stories, but these are appropriate to the worlds in which they live: stories of failure, loss, and unhappiness. The excep…
Art (36 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (34 works) · Literature (31 works) · Psychology (29 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · History (26 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Linguistics (23 works) · Political science (11 works) · Cognitive science (9 works)