Elton Barker
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3849045 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Elton Barker |
| PRENOMES | Elton |
| SOBRENOME | Barker |
| ASSINATURA | BARKER E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9517-1176 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 23 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Digital Approaches to Investigating Space and Place in Classical Studies
Imagine a student reading Odysseus’ Cretan tale at Odyssey 19.172–84. When faced by a string of unfamiliar names – in addition to ‘native Cretans’, there are Achaeans, Cydonians and Dorians, as well as the individuals Minos, Deucalion, Idomeneus and the speaker, Aethon (Odysseus in disguise) –, they use their digital edition to find out more about each of these people and their places of origin. A personal name opens an online encyclopaedia entry…
Ch. 6. Die Another Day
Published in Ivan Matijašić, ed., Herodotus - The Most Homeric Historian? (HISTOS Supplement 14), p. 161-210
Epic
As the son of Zeus, accomplisher of great tasks, and civilizing agent, Heracles appears an archetypal hero, central to any number of myths and whose deeds dominate artistic representation. Yet his appearances in extant early Greek hexameter poetry are fleeting and carefully circumscribed. In this chapter we survey the references to an epic Heracles in order to establish common elements (his “fabula”); consider what picture emerges from the (fragm…
On Space, Place, and Form in Herodotus’ Histories
This article reflects on how our own technological developments can help us see Herodotus’ archetype of historical inquiry in a new light. It explores various aspects of place in the Histories—as spaces that are lived, constructed, and relational—to show how and why the idea of place can be such a powerful means for linking information and understanding the past. In discussing the role of place in structuring Herodotus’ narrative, it argues that …
Pelagios – Connecting Histories of Place. Part II
This article, which forms the second part of a two-part article in this volume, reflects on what we argue to be the most crucial element of any Linked Data enterprise: its community. The first section discusses a variety of funded and unfunded activities conducted under the aegis of Pelagios, and specifically two ‘small grant’ programmes that dramatically expanded its scope and reach. The second section describes the evolution of Pelagios as a ‘c…
New Worlds from Old Texts
Despite earlier expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, ‘maps matter’ today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. In contrast to the traditional ‘topographic’ perspective, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is being increasingly conceived though a ‘topological’ lens, in which the nature and frequency of links among different sites matter more than the phys…
Even Heracles Had to Die
Our purpose in this chapter is not to try to reconstruct the lost epics of Heracles but rather to use the conceptual framework of interformularity and intertraditionality to explore the ways in which the Iliad represents Heracles and makes his tradition speak to the concerns of this narrative. We begin by sketching out the antiquity of Heracles in myth and assessing its resonance in the fragmentary and extant poetry from the archaic period. After…
Gap
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that will mine the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text. The traditional difficulty of identifying place names wi…
‘Possessing an unbridled tongue’
This chapter tackles the issue of tragic politics through a study of tragedy's discourse and form. Turning away from the customary focus on the subject matter of individual plays, and the extent or otherwise of their political or democratic referentiality, it develops the notion of frank speaking (parrhēsia) to encompass the event of speaking back (dissent) that is evident in any play's agonistic structure; in particular, it focuses attention on …
Colloquium
This article offers reflections arising from a recent colloquium at the Open University on the implications of the development of digital humanities for research in arts disciplines, and also for their interactions with computing and technology. Particular issues explored include the ways in which the digital turn in humanities research is also a spatial/visual one; the tension between analysis based on the extensive ‘hard’ data generated by digi…
Introduction
This section introduces the twin chapters on Homeric epic, the Iliad and Odyssey. Its methodological basis for comparison derives from J. Foley, who proposes using the idea of resonance—the process by which formulae evoke a wider epic tradition and, in turn, resonate through each and every particular instance—to explore inter-poetic rivalry. It identifies scenes of debate through a lexical study of the term ‘agora’ and its associated formulae, on…
Introduction
This section establishes the context for reading the historians' differing responses to the foundational narratives of Homeric epic. It identifies the key aspect for thinking about debate in the historians in terms of their marginality: as writers of prose they stand on the margins of their culture, which privileges the spoken word in public contexts, and being personally responsible for their accounts they also rely on the way in which they pres…
Introduction
This section considers debate in its most fully realized institutional form, that of tragedy, which by its very form represents debate, not only in the specific feature of the agon, but in the many conflicts between characters on stage. It is particularly concerned to engage with the recent controversies regarding whether tragedy is political or not, and the extent to which tragedy relates specifically to Athenian democracy or more broadly to any…
Challenging authority in the assemblies of the Iliad
This chapter examines representations of debate in the Iliad. Focusing on scenes of assembly among the Achaeans, it argues that dissent is made institutional as the poem unwinds: Achilles establishes the precedent for challenging the king in the opening act; subsequent episodes in books 2 and 9 explore possibilities for dissent by not relying on Achilles' individual performance but working within the institution of assembly he set up; the assembl…
Epilogue
Using George W. Bush's second inauguration speech, which addresses both the importance of institutions to a community's freedom and the cultural distinctiveness of those institutions, this last section emphasizes the importance of structures within texts for not only representing but also reproducing values such as freedom or frank speaking. Each of the case studies presented here have shown the importance of managing dissent within the community…
Prologue
This chapter introduces the book's subject, methodology, and aims. Noting limitations in scope and tendency towards abstraction of previous studies, it considers the broader institutional context for debate and examines its various manifestations in texts. Three arguments are proposed: that debate plays a critical role in both oral and written narrative (epic and historiography) and drama (tragedy); that debate is best thought of in terms of the …
Sidelining debate in the Odyssey
This chapter examines representations of debate in the Odyssey, with the suggestion that its less prominent role has implications for the standard view of this poem as playfully dialogic. Reduced to only two events, debate comes across not only as marginal to its narrative dynamics but also as socially divisive: these two Ithacan assembly scenes split down partisan lines, with neither group, those with Odysseus and those against him (the suitors)…
Herodotus' Odyssean enquiry
This chapter discusses Herodotus' enquiry into a war between east and west in the wake of the Iliad, but shows that debate is represented in a quite different manner. While shown to cherish the values of freedom, the Greeks' pursuit of self-government happens in spite of the assembly, which is dominated by self-interest and fraught with division; it is the Persians who, though lacking a comparable civic framework, are represented as conducting th…
Beyond the agon in Euripides' Hecuba
This chapter discusses the similar emphasis placed on spectating and speaking back by Euripides' Hecuba but from an alternative Odyssean strategy, which maximizes unease over tragedy's recuperative powers. It traces how this play makes a spectacle of Hecuba's suffering, maximizing sympathy for her as she first endures unending sorrow and then takes revenge. The play's Odyssean insistence on the authority of her suffering culminates when an on-sta…
Thucydides writes debate
This chapter tackles the consensus regarding the authority of Thucydides' voice and the view that his narrative stands in opposition to the democratic assembly as depicted in the text (Ober). It argues that it is best to read Thucydides' representation of debate as agon as part of, not separate from, the narrative: the formal structure of opposing speeches gives the reader the tools with which to analyse the speakers' rhetoric; but, at the same t…
Speaking back in Sophocles' Ajax
This chapter tackles head-on the problem of the double agon in the play's second half, as Teucer and the Atreidae argue over Ajax's body, and interprets it as part of a strategy that emphasizes spectating and speaking back. Points of contact with the Iliad demonstrate this shift in perspective from the hero to those looking on, as first Odysseus is installed as a spectator of Ajax's Achilles-like dialogue with Athena, Ajax's men articulate their …
Entering the Agon
This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature—the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words—and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, historiography and tragedy. Combining literary dialogic theory with sociological approaches towards structure, it…
Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society
Reviewed by: Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society: Oath-Making Rituals and Narratives in the Iliad Elton Barker Margo Kitts . Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society: Oath-Making Rituals and Narratives in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 244. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-521-85529-7. One new trend in Homeric studies is oral traditional theory, which, through the study of formulaic utterances, places the Homeric poems in a w…
Achilles' last stand
Debate in the Iliad – what form it takes, what significance that might have, whether or not it even exists – has been a matter of some controversy. One approach has been to examine debate in terms of a formal social context and to extrapolate from this some kind of political or – according to other accounts – pre-political community that the Iliad preserves. Scholars have, however come up with very different ideas about how to describe that socie…
Entering the Agon
This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature—the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words—and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, historiography and tragedy. Combining literary dialogic theory with sociological approaches towards structure, it…
New Worlds from Old Texts
Despite earlier expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, ‘maps matter’ today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. In contrast to the traditional ‘topographic’ perspective, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is being increasingly conceived though a ‘topological’ lens, in which the nature and frequency of links among different sites matter more than the phys…
Even Heracles Had to Die
Our purpose in this chapter is not to try to reconstruct the lost epics of Heracles but rather to use the conceptual framework of interformularity and intertraditionality to explore the ways in which the Iliad represents Heracles and makes his tradition speak to the concerns of this narrative. We begin by sketching out the antiquity of Heracles in myth and assessing its resonance in the fragmentary and extant poetry from the archaic period. After…
Gap
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that will mine the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text. The traditional difficulty of identifying place names wi…
Achilles' last stand
Debate in the Iliad – what form it takes, what significance that might have, whether or not it even exists – has been a matter of some controversy. One approach has been to examine debate in terms of a formal social context and to extrapolate from this some kind of political or – according to other accounts – pre-political community that the Iliad preserves. Scholars have, however come up with very different ideas about how to describe that socie…
Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society
Reviewed by: Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society: Oath-Making Rituals and Narratives in the Iliad Elton Barker Margo Kitts . Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society: Oath-Making Rituals and Narratives in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 244. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-521-85529-7. One new trend in Homeric studies is oral traditional theory, which, through the study of formulaic utterances, places the Homeric poems in a w…
Introduction
This section introduces the twin chapters on Homeric epic, the Iliad and Odyssey. Its methodological basis for comparison derives from J. Foley, who proposes using the idea of resonance—the process by which formulae evoke a wider epic tradition and, in turn, resonate through each and every particular instance—to explore inter-poetic rivalry. It identifies scenes of debate through a lexical study of the term ‘agora’ and its associated formulae, on…
Introduction
This section establishes the context for reading the historians' differing responses to the foundational narratives of Homeric epic. It identifies the key aspect for thinking about debate in the historians in terms of their marginality: as writers of prose they stand on the margins of their culture, which privileges the spoken word in public contexts, and being personally responsible for their accounts they also rely on the way in which they pres…
Introduction
This section considers debate in its most fully realized institutional form, that of tragedy, which by its very form represents debate, not only in the specific feature of the agon, but in the many conflicts between characters on stage. It is particularly concerned to engage with the recent controversies regarding whether tragedy is political or not, and the extent to which tragedy relates specifically to Athenian democracy or more broadly to any…
Challenging authority in the assemblies of the Iliad
This chapter examines representations of debate in the Iliad. Focusing on scenes of assembly among the Achaeans, it argues that dissent is made institutional as the poem unwinds: Achilles establishes the precedent for challenging the king in the opening act; subsequent episodes in books 2 and 9 explore possibilities for dissent by not relying on Achilles' individual performance but working within the institution of assembly he set up; the assembl…
Epilogue
Using George W. Bush's second inauguration speech, which addresses both the importance of institutions to a community's freedom and the cultural distinctiveness of those institutions, this last section emphasizes the importance of structures within texts for not only representing but also reproducing values such as freedom or frank speaking. Each of the case studies presented here have shown the importance of managing dissent within the community…
Prologue
This chapter introduces the book's subject, methodology, and aims. Noting limitations in scope and tendency towards abstraction of previous studies, it considers the broader institutional context for debate and examines its various manifestations in texts. Three arguments are proposed: that debate plays a critical role in both oral and written narrative (epic and historiography) and drama (tragedy); that debate is best thought of in terms of the …
Sidelining debate in the Odyssey
This chapter examines representations of debate in the Odyssey, with the suggestion that its less prominent role has implications for the standard view of this poem as playfully dialogic. Reduced to only two events, debate comes across not only as marginal to its narrative dynamics but also as socially divisive: these two Ithacan assembly scenes split down partisan lines, with neither group, those with Odysseus and those against him (the suitors)…
Herodotus' Odyssean enquiry
This chapter discusses Herodotus' enquiry into a war between east and west in the wake of the Iliad, but shows that debate is represented in a quite different manner. While shown to cherish the values of freedom, the Greeks' pursuit of self-government happens in spite of the assembly, which is dominated by self-interest and fraught with division; it is the Persians who, though lacking a comparable civic framework, are represented as conducting th…
Beyond the agon in Euripides' Hecuba
This chapter discusses the similar emphasis placed on spectating and speaking back by Euripides' Hecuba but from an alternative Odyssean strategy, which maximizes unease over tragedy's recuperative powers. It traces how this play makes a spectacle of Hecuba's suffering, maximizing sympathy for her as she first endures unending sorrow and then takes revenge. The play's Odyssean insistence on the authority of her suffering culminates when an on-sta…
Thucydides writes debate
This chapter tackles the consensus regarding the authority of Thucydides' voice and the view that his narrative stands in opposition to the democratic assembly as depicted in the text (Ober). It argues that it is best to read Thucydides' representation of debate as agon as part of, not separate from, the narrative: the formal structure of opposing speeches gives the reader the tools with which to analyse the speakers' rhetoric; but, at the same t…
Speaking back in Sophocles' Ajax
This chapter tackles head-on the problem of the double agon in the play's second half, as Teucer and the Atreidae argue over Ajax's body, and interprets it as part of a strategy that emphasizes spectating and speaking back. Points of contact with the Iliad demonstrate this shift in perspective from the hero to those looking on, as first Odysseus is installed as a spectator of Ajax's Achilles-like dialogue with Athena, Ajax's men articulate their …
Entering the Agon
This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature—the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words—and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, historiography and tragedy. Combining literary dialogic theory with sociological approaches towards structure, it…
‘Possessing an unbridled tongue’
This chapter tackles the issue of tragic politics through a study of tragedy's discourse and form. Turning away from the customary focus on the subject matter of individual plays, and the extent or otherwise of their political or democratic referentiality, it develops the notion of frank speaking (parrhēsia) to encompass the event of speaking back (dissent) that is evident in any play's agonistic structure; in particular, it focuses attention on …
Colloquium
This article offers reflections arising from a recent colloquium at the Open University on the implications of the development of digital humanities for research in arts disciplines, and also for their interactions with computing and technology. Particular issues explored include the ways in which the digital turn in humanities research is also a spatial/visual one; the tension between analysis based on the extensive ‘hard’ data generated by digi…
Gap
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that will mine the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text. The traditional difficulty of identifying place names wi…
Even Heracles Had to Die
Our purpose in this chapter is not to try to reconstruct the lost epics of Heracles but rather to use the conceptual framework of interformularity and intertraditionality to explore the ways in which the Iliad represents Heracles and makes his tradition speak to the concerns of this narrative. We begin by sketching out the antiquity of Heracles in myth and assessing its resonance in the fragmentary and extant poetry from the archaic period. After…
New Worlds from Old Texts
Despite earlier expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, ‘maps matter’ today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. In contrast to the traditional ‘topographic’ perspective, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is being increasingly conceived though a ‘topological’ lens, in which the nature and frequency of links among different sites matter more than the phys…
Epic
As the son of Zeus, accomplisher of great tasks, and civilizing agent, Heracles appears an archetypal hero, central to any number of myths and whose deeds dominate artistic representation. Yet his appearances in extant early Greek hexameter poetry are fleeting and carefully circumscribed. In this chapter we survey the references to an epic Heracles in order to establish common elements (his “fabula”); consider what picture emerges from the (fragm…
On Space, Place, and Form in Herodotus’ Histories
This article reflects on how our own technological developments can help us see Herodotus’ archetype of historical inquiry in a new light. It explores various aspects of place in the Histories—as spaces that are lived, constructed, and relational—to show how and why the idea of place can be such a powerful means for linking information and understanding the past. In discussing the role of place in structuring Herodotus’ narrative, it argues that …
Pelagios – Connecting Histories of Place. Part II
This article, which forms the second part of a two-part article in this volume, reflects on what we argue to be the most crucial element of any Linked Data enterprise: its community. The first section discusses a variety of funded and unfunded activities conducted under the aegis of Pelagios, and specifically two ‘small grant’ programmes that dramatically expanded its scope and reach. The second section describes the evolution of Pelagios as a ‘c…
Ch. 6. Die Another Day
Published in Ivan Matijašić, ed., Herodotus - The Most Homeric Historian? (HISTOS Supplement 14), p. 161-210
Digital Approaches to Investigating Space and Place in Classical Studies
Imagine a student reading Odysseus’ Cretan tale at Odyssey 19.172–84. When faced by a string of unfamiliar names – in addition to ‘native Cretans’, there are Achaeans, Cydonians and Dorians, as well as the individuals Minos, Deucalion, Idomeneus and the speaker, Aethon (Odysseus in disguise) –, they use their digital edition to find out more about each of these people and their places of origin. A personal name opens an online encyclopaedia entry…
Art (19 obras) · Classical Antiquity Studies (19 obras) · Literature (18 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Philosophy (14 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · History (12 obras) · Narrative (12 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras)