About

Egbert Bakker is the Alvan Talcott Professor of Classics at Yale University, where he has taught since 2004. He holds a PhD from Leiden University, obtained in 1988, and has previously held academic positions at the University of Texas at Austin, Université de Montréal, University of Virginia, and Leiden University. His research focuses on Greek language and literature, with particular interest in the linguistic aspects of poetic problems. Bakker has written extensively on Homeric poetry and language, oral poetry, poetic performance, the linguistic articulation of narrative, and the differences between speaking and writing. His long-term projects include a commentary on Book 11 of the Iliad and a new Homeric grammar. Among his recent publications are books such as 'Authorship and Greek Song: Authority, Authenticity, and Performance,' 'Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics,' 'A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language,' and 'The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey.' His commentary on Book 9 of the Odyssey is scheduled for publication in February 2025. Bakker's work contributes to the understanding of Greek language, oral tradition, and Homeric poetics, emphasizing the linguistic and performative aspects of ancient Greek literature.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• History
• Literature
• Art
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Epistemology
• Law
• Psychology
• Physics

Selected publications

• :<i>Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory: Towards a Critical Dialogue</i>

  Classical Philology · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • History
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Interformulaic Homer: Evidence from the “Wild” Papyri

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Linguistics
  • Art

  Oral-formulaic theory sawi nt he Homeric formulas as ystem enabling singers to compose the epic tale while performing before an audience. Everything other than this situation was dismissed as "literate",h ence not relevant for the studyo fH omer as oral poetry.Todayw ea re able to appreciate that "literacy" is not am onolithic concept,b ut culturallyd etermined and embedded. The existence of textsc hanges, but does not end, the nature of Homer as oral poetry.I nt his paper Ie xplore an umber of ways in which the formulaic system is cognitively importantinthe presenceofwritten texts of the epic. First,formula as formulas are ap owerful aid in memorization and recall, which makes them indispensable not onlyf or oral composition, but also for the performance of a written Homer.S econd, the Homeric poems begin also to constituteam eta-languagewhen phrases are used with full awareness of the context(s) in which they occurred previously. The conscious use of formulas as referencetoother instances of the formula can be called "interformularity".

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to End theOdyssey

  Trends in Classics · 2020 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Literature

  Abstract This contribution discusses the plot of the Odyssey as a field of opposing forces shaping the ending of the poem: (i) the generic tension between folktale and epic; (ii) the fundamental ambiguity of the poem’s climactic event, the killing of the Suitors (justice or revenge?); and (iii) the antagonism between Zeus and Poseidon. On this basis two competing scenarios for the ending of the poem are proposed: amnesia and departure, the former viewing the theme of revenge on the human plane, the latter on the divine.

  PublisherDOI

• Homeric OytoΣ and the Poetics of Deixis

  2019-10-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The narrative dimension of “near” and “far” interacts in curious ways with a well-known feature of Homeric poetry: the diachronic dimension of Greek epic diction. The various attempts of Homerists to explain the coexistence of old and new can serve as an instructive way to review Homeric scholarship through the ages. In a major paradigm shift in Homeric studies, Parry introduced the principle of “economy.” The new, performative view of Homeric poetry has important consequences for the conception of Kunstsprache and its diachronic layering. Hesiod’s way of speaking offers more opportunities than Homer’s to use the demonstrative of dialogic deixis, even though in Hesiodic poetry there is much less direct speech than in Homer. Homer, the speaker of the Odyssey, the speaker of the present, finally puts his stamp on the bewildering chaos of voices and performances that has preceded.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning the epic formula

  2019-12-05 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter offers a broad overview of oral-formulaic theory. It argues that the conditions for formulaic composition of epic poetry in hexametric verse are not confined to the historical context envisaged by oral-formulaic theory: the production of epic song in the complete absence of writing and texts. Reading and writing in their earliest stages do not end a poet's reliance on the interplay between formulas and the verse. Nor are formulas as such a phenomenon that is confined to oral-formulaic poetry: ordinary language is full of ready-made phrases and word combinations, and the way in which an apprentice poet learns the epic language is not fundamentally different from the way in which children learn their native language. The chapter ends with a brief analysis of some lines of the late antique epic poet Quintus of Smyrna as an illustration that even under conditions of full literacy poets can acquire and interiorise the epic language.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>In and Out of the Golden Age: A Hesiodic Reading of the</i>Odyssey

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-05-23 · 9 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

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• Poetry in Speech

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2018-05-26 · 98 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Applying linguistic theory to the study of Homeric style, Egbert J. Bakker offers a highly innovative approach to oral poetry, particularly the poetry of Homer. By situating formulas and other features of oral style within the wider contexts of spoken language and communication, he moves the study of oral poetry beyond the landmark work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord.One of the book's central features, related to the research of the linguist Wallace Chafe, is Bakker's conception of spoken discourse as a sequence of short speech units reflecting the flow of speech through the consciousness of the speaker. Bakker shows that such short speech units are present in Homeric poetry, with significant consequences for Homeric metrics and poetics. Considering Homeric discourse as a speech process rather than as the finished product associated with written discourse, Bakker's book offers a new perspective on Homer as well as on other archaic Greek texts. Here Homeric discourse appears as speech in its own right, and is freed, Bakker suggests, from the bias of modern writing style which too easily views Homeric discourse as archaic, implicitly taking the style of classical period texts as the norm. Bakker's perspective reaches beyond syntax and stylistics into the very heart of Homeric—and, ultimately, oral—poetics, altering the status of key features such as meter and formula, rethinking their relevance to the performance of Homeric poetry, and leading to surprising insights into the relation between "speech" and "text" in the encounter of the Homeric tradition with writing

  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 8. The Grammar of Poetry

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2018-07-06

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Special Speech discourse.To put this aesthetic of expansion in perspective, let us now turn fo r the last time to the phenomenon of recurrence in ordinary speech. Routinization and DeroutinizationThe presence of fo rmulas in a language or idiom is obviously a fa ctor conducive to repetition in the discourses conducted in that language.In line with the argument of Chapter 7, however, in which I suggested that linguistic expressions be viewed as behaviors rather than as things, we may also reverse the statement: fo rmulas are not only a source fo r repetition, but also a consequence of certain recurrent contexts in which a given expres sion is required.The result of such recurrence may be routinization: within one's total behavior a given way of expression may prove so useful as a method of coping with a recurrent speech situation that it becomes stan dardized, serving as the model fo r future expressions to be uttered under the same circumstances.The routinization may even increase to the point at which the expression comes to �e used in situations that are merely similar, not identical, to the original context.In such cases the original meaning of the phrase may come to be bleached, by the loss of one or more fe atures proper to the original context.3We saw in Chapter 6 that what is involuntary has a natural counterpart in deliberate enhancement: the segmentation of speech that is due to cog nitive constraints was shown to be stylized by rhythm.In the same way the routine or idiomatic utterance of given expressions in ordinary speech is balanced by an opposite phenomenon: the tendency to use routinized, idiomatic phrases fo r new purpost:s.In terms that have been used in the study of grammar, one might speak of a process of deroutinization as a counterpart of ro utinization.4 This tendency to deroutinize certain ways of expression may be called innovation, not in the sense that original and 3 This is what I have discussed elsewhere (Bakker 1988: 14-18, 239-65, 273-74) as the use of a linguistic item outside its "prototypical" use in the original context.The principle of pro totypicality derives from the study of how people create and experience categories (Rosch 1973; 1978) and has been applied to the study of linguistic categories such as noun or verb (e.g., Hopper and Thompson 1984; Givon 1984-91: 12-23) as well as of the lexicon (e.g., Geeraerts 1988).The idea of routinization, furthermore, can be applied not just to the utterance of phrases but also to the system of the language itself, gramm ar being the process by which certain phrases become grammatical by constant recurrence.On this process of grammaticalization, see Heine et al.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Speech and Text: A Conclusion

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2018-07-06

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• CHAPTER 7. Epithets and Epic Epiphany

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2018-07-06

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Epithets and Epic EpiphanyThe Mythic Idea ... finds expression in the ... belief ... that the name of a person is an integral part of his being.For this belief rests on the ulterior assumption that personality consists not only in the visible corporeal self but also in some wider preterpunctual essence of which the name is a peculiarly appropriate symbol inasmuch as it indeed represents the individual even when his body is absent or defunct.-Theodore H.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Irene J. F. de Jong

  5 shared

• Carolyn Dewald

  5 shared

• Hans van Wees

  5 shared

• Nino Luraghi

  New College

  2 shared

• P.B. Checkland

  Imperial Metals (Canada)

  1 shared

• H.J.C. Bakker

  1 shared

• Rachel S.C. Friedman

  Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center

  1 shared

• Robert Fowler

  Johns Hopkins Hospital

  1 shared