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Performance and Entextualisation in Ancient Greek Literature and Beyond
29 June - 1 July 2016
University College London
The last decades have transformed the way we look at Classical Greek poetry and prose. No longer simply a corpus of autonomous texts to be read and analysed, we have come to view literature and its genres as performances embedded in social space, and with a concrete social or ritual function. But this in turn has meant that our understanding of ancient textuality - what texts meant, how they were transmitted and used, how they functioned, and the nature and power of authorial voice, and its relation to other textual voices - has also been transformed. Entextualisation is increasingly understood not as a single process, but rather a variety of different ones with specific social aims and consequences; and performance studies has introduced new ways of understanding how different texts and genres construct a speaking voice. The cultural construction of textuality itself has come into focus in criticism, as has the idea of an easy transition from 'song culture' to 'book culture' in the Hellenistic period. This conference aims to bring together academics not only from within Classics, but also scholars dealing with similar issues of performance and textuality outside of the Classical tradition, in order to provide new theoretical perspectives on the changing and fluid relationship between performance and textuality in different genres, time-periods, cultures and contexts. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the UCL Octagon Grants Fund, and the UCL Department of Greek and Latin.
Schedule
- June 29 (IAS COMMON GROUND, SOUTH WING)
1:30-2:00 REGISTRATION
2:00-2:30pm Welcome
EARLY BEGINNINGS
2:30-3:35 Richard Janko (University of Michigan): Creativity and Epic Tradition: are the Homeric poems post-traditional texts?'
3:35-4:00 Tea
4:00-5:05 Lawrence Kowerski (Hunter College-CUNY, New York): The Theognidea as Performance and Text
5:15 Wine reception
- June 30 (IAS COMMON GROUND, SOUTH WING)
TEXT AND STAGE
10-11:05am Niall Slater (Emory University): 'Modified rapture!' Entextualizing Comic Performance
11:05-11:30 Tea
11:30-12:35 Naomi Scott (UCL): Text, Intertext, and Performance in Aristophanes
12:35-2:00 Lunch
PROSE IN PERFORMANCE
2:00-3:05 David Fearn (Warwick): 'Texture and textuality. Gorgias' Encomium of Helen and Greek Lyric Poetry'
3:05-3:30 Tea
3:30-4:35 Iwona Wieżel (KUL-John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin): Clash of Worlds: Orality and Textualization in Herodotus' Narrative
DINNER
- July 1 (IAS COMMON GROUND, WILKINS BUILDING)
BEYOND THE CLASSICAL
10:00-11:05 Max Leventhal (Cambridge): Wine, Wit, and Wisdom: Hellenistic Sympotic Contexts for Performing the Entextualised
11:05-11:30 Tea
11:30- 12:35 Valeria Pace (Gonville & Caius, Cambridge): Performing gender in epic character-voices: which difference a text? A case study on Homer and Apollonius of Rhodes
12:35- 2:00 Lunch
(ROOM CHANGE: Pearson [North East Entrance] G22 LT)
2:00-3:05 Thomas Hinton (Exeter): 'Loving, Singing, Writing: Present and Absent Voices in Medieval French and Occitan Narratives About Lyric'
3:05-3:30 Tea
3:30-4:30 Closing Discussion
For further information please contact Naomi Scott
