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Books by Alexander Kirichenko
Greek Literature and the Ideal contends that the development of Greek literature was motivated by... more Greek Literature and the Ideal contends that the development of Greek literature was motivated by the need to endow political geography with a sense of purposeful structure. Alexander Kirichenko argues that Greek literature was a crucial factor in the cultural production of space, and Greek geography a crucial factor in the production of literary meaning. The book focuses on the idealizing images that Greek literature created of three spatial patterns of power distribution: a decentralized network of aristocratically governed communities (Archaic Greece); a democratic city controlling an empire (Classical Athens); and a microcosm of Greek culture located on foreign soil, ruled by quasi-divine royals, and populated by immigrants (Ptolemaic Alexandria). Kirichenko draws connections between the formation of these idealizing images and the emergence of such literary modes of meaning making as the authoritative communication of the truth, the dialogic encouragement to search for the truth on one's own, and the abandonment of transcendental goals for the sake of cultural memory and/or aesthetic pleasure. Readings of such canonical Greek authors as Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, Thucydides, Plato, Callimachus, and Theocritus show that the pragmatics of Greek literature (the sum total of the ideological, cognitive, and emotional effects that it seeks to produce) is, in essence, always a pragmatics of space: there is a strong correlation between the historically conditioned patterns of political geography and the changing mechanisms whereby Greek literature enabled its recipients to make sense of their world.
thersites 11 (2020): tessellae – Birthday Issue for Christine Walde (ed. Annemarie Ambühl): Open Access https://thersites-journal.de/index.php/thr/issue/view/14, 2020
This special birthday issue for Christine Walde, co-founder and co-editor of thersites, features ... more This special birthday issue for Christine Walde, co-founder and co-editor of thersites, features contributions from colleagues and friends. The articles, essays, and book reviews, centering around the honoranda’s research interests as well as focusing on core topics of thersites, form a thematically varied mosaic (tessellae): innovative constructions of literary genres and poetics (especially bucolic, elegy, epic, and epigram), images of the city of Rome and its counterparts, sleep and dreams, history of classical scholarship, gender studies, and classical reception studies.
Papers by Alexander Kirichenko
Von Koppenfels, M. - Mühlbacher, M. (eds) Adventure at Arms: On the Narrative Formation of Violence, 2024
Dieser Beitrag untersucht den Theaterbegriff als eine facettenreiche Denkfigur, die Tacitus im Di... more Dieser Beitrag untersucht den Theaterbegriff als eine facettenreiche Denkfigur, die Tacitus im Dialogus de oratoribus benutzt, um den Unterschied zwischen den früheren Epochen der römischen Geschichte und der kaiserzeitlichen Alleinherrschaft zu verdeutlichen. Während in der späten Republik und unter Augustus die performative Kraft der Beredsamkeit bzw. der Dichtung mit der emotionalen Wirkung einer theatralischen Aufführung assoziiert werden konnte, wird das Theater in der postaugusteischen Kultur laut dem Dialogus zum Synonym der substanzlosen Nachahmung und somit der absoluten Ohnmacht der Sprache. Dieser Eindruck wird besonders dadurch verstärkt, dass, während sich die Tragödie als die einzige literarische Gattung erweist, die im kaiserzeitlichen Rom noch imstande ist, eine mit der republikanischen Beredsamkeit vergleichbare Wirkung zu
Symbolae Osloenses Norwegian Journal of Greek and Latin Studies, 2021
Materiali e discussion per l'analisi dei testi classici, 2018
dynamics of Roman patronage provides a metaphorical basis for an innovative (meta-)poetic discour... more dynamics of Roman patronage provides a metaphorical basis for an innovative (meta-)poetic discourse. It argues that the progression from the orality of the Satires to the epistolarity of the Epistles encodes an intricate dialectics between freedom and dependence (ethical, aesthetical, and political alike) and thereby reflects on the way Horace's poetry produces meaning.
Greek Literature and the Ideal contends that the development of Greek literature was motivated by... more Greek Literature and the Ideal contends that the development of Greek literature was motivated by the need to endow political geography with a sense of purposeful structure. Alexander Kirichenko argues that Greek literature was a crucial factor in the cultural production of space, and Greek geography a crucial factor in the production of literary meaning. The book focuses on the idealizing images that Greek literature created of three spatial patterns of power distribution: a decentralized network of aristocratically governed communities (Archaic Greece); a democratic city controlling an empire (Classical Athens); and a microcosm of Greek culture located on foreign soil, ruled by quasi-divine royals, and populated by immigrants (Ptolemaic Alexandria). Kirichenko draws connections between the formation of these idealizing images and the emergence of such literary modes of meaning making as the authoritative communication of the truth, the dialogic encouragement to search for the truth on one's own, and the abandonment of transcendental goals for the sake of cultural memory and/or aesthetic pleasure. Readings of such canonical Greek authors as Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, Thucydides, Plato, Callimachus, and Theocritus show that the pragmatics of Greek literature (the sum total of the ideological, cognitive, and emotional effects that it seeks to produce) is, in essence, always a pragmatics of space: there is a strong correlation between the historically conditioned patterns of political geography and the changing mechanisms whereby Greek literature enabled its recipients to make sense of their world.
thersites 11 (2020): tessellae – Birthday Issue for Christine Walde (ed. Annemarie Ambühl): Open Access https://thersites-journal.de/index.php/thr/issue/view/14, 2020
This special birthday issue for Christine Walde, co-founder and co-editor of thersites, features ... more This special birthday issue for Christine Walde, co-founder and co-editor of thersites, features contributions from colleagues and friends. The articles, essays, and book reviews, centering around the honoranda’s research interests as well as focusing on core topics of thersites, form a thematically varied mosaic (tessellae): innovative constructions of literary genres and poetics (especially bucolic, elegy, epic, and epigram), images of the city of Rome and its counterparts, sleep and dreams, history of classical scholarship, gender studies, and classical reception studies.
Von Koppenfels, M. - Mühlbacher, M. (eds) Adventure at Arms: On the Narrative Formation of Violence, 2024
Dieser Beitrag untersucht den Theaterbegriff als eine facettenreiche Denkfigur, die Tacitus im Di... more Dieser Beitrag untersucht den Theaterbegriff als eine facettenreiche Denkfigur, die Tacitus im Dialogus de oratoribus benutzt, um den Unterschied zwischen den früheren Epochen der römischen Geschichte und der kaiserzeitlichen Alleinherrschaft zu verdeutlichen. Während in der späten Republik und unter Augustus die performative Kraft der Beredsamkeit bzw. der Dichtung mit der emotionalen Wirkung einer theatralischen Aufführung assoziiert werden konnte, wird das Theater in der postaugusteischen Kultur laut dem Dialogus zum Synonym der substanzlosen Nachahmung und somit der absoluten Ohnmacht der Sprache. Dieser Eindruck wird besonders dadurch verstärkt, dass, während sich die Tragödie als die einzige literarische Gattung erweist, die im kaiserzeitlichen Rom noch imstande ist, eine mit der republikanischen Beredsamkeit vergleichbare Wirkung zu
Symbolae Osloenses Norwegian Journal of Greek and Latin Studies, 2021
Materiali e discussion per l'analisi dei testi classici, 2018
dynamics of Roman patronage provides a metaphorical basis for an innovative (meta-)poetic discour... more dynamics of Roman patronage provides a metaphorical basis for an innovative (meta-)poetic discourse. It argues that the progression from the orality of the Satires to the epistolarity of the Epistles encodes an intricate dialectics between freedom and dependence (ethical, aesthetical, and political alike) and thereby reflects on the way Horace's poetry produces meaning.
Inspired by insights of modern cognitive science, this article investigates the use of self-refer... more Inspired by insights of modern cognitive science, this article investigates the use of self-referential metaphors in Pindar's epinicians and demonstrates that these metaphors serve to enhance the cognitive effect of the rhetoric of praise. The starting point of the argument is the (dis)analogy between the self-referential deixis that religious hymns use to map aetiological myths to their performance context and the self-refer-ential metaphors that Pindar uses to blend the observable context of the victory celebration with the context of the original victory. It is to emphasize the 'presentification' of the victory in the context of the victory celebration (and beyond) that Pindar employs the analogy between poetry and visual arts—presenting his poems either as architectural structures commemorating multiple layers of the past (Olympian 6) or as victor statues endowed with speech and movement (Nemean 5). Keywords Pindar – victory celebration – self-referential metaphors – text and image
