Talk at Fordham University, New York (original) (raw)
In this paper I consider the possibility of reading (Latin) texts from a different perspective than intertextuality whose major goal is to create historical affiliations between texts, and I turn instead to macrotextuality. A hermeneutical tool developed by the literary semiotics of the seventies, the concept of ‘macrotext’ was originally applied to texts that result from a collection of several units, such as the collection of short stories. I reinterpret the concept of macrotext on the basis of these two preliminary observations: 1) any text can be considered a macrotext, since a text qua text is always the result of an assemblage, of the weaving together of different threads; 2) as such, the macrotext produces a meaning that not only differs, but ends up entering in conflict with the meaning produced by the single units that compose it. This conflict can arise both from the text itself and from the non-verbal communication of the text, such as its structure. After presenting the theoretical framework in the first part of the paper, I will apply it to some examples from Latin literature (Vergil, Vitruvius, the Panegyrici Latini).
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