Introduction to Allusion, Authority, and Truth (eds. Phillip Mitsis and Christos Tsagalis) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry
2023
Challenging many established narratives of literary history, this book investigates how the earliest known Greek poets (seventh to fifth centuries BCE) signposted their debts to their predecessors and prior traditions – placing markers in their works for audiences to recognise (much like the 'Easter eggs' of modern cinema). Within antiquity, such signposting has often been considered the preserve of later literary cultures, closely linked with the development of libraries, literacy and writing. In this wide-ranging new study, Thomas Nelson shows that these devices were already deeply ingrained in oral archaic Greek poetry, deconstructing the artificial boundary between a supposedly 'primal' archaic literature and a supposedly 'sophisticated' book culture of Hellenistic Alexandria and Rome. In three interlocking case studies, he highlights how poets from Homer to Pindar employed the language of hearsay, memory and time to index their allusive relationships, as they variously embraced, reworked and challenged their inherited tradition.
Modern Literary Theory and the Ancient Novel: Poetics and Rhetoric, edited by Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, Stephen A. Nimis, and Massimo Fusillo, 2022
Modern critical terminology is full of references to ancient literary theory, whose precepts are often used as a starting point for new theories. Unfortunately, the opposite situation does not occur often. While there has been some progress in recent years in applying the methods of modern critical theory and the insights of related disciplines such as narratology, reader-response theory and modern and post-modern criticism to classical literature and specifically to the area of the ancient novel, only sporadically has classical literature been studied and analyzed according to these exegetical trends. The course taken by research in literary studies has also demonstrated that rhetoric is a fundamental discipline forTheory of Literature and for literary praxis. It is not only a science for the future but also a science à la mode, which finds its own place on the edge of structuralism, “New Criticism”, and semiology. In the Greek world under the Roman Empire, the tradition of rhetorical learning reached its heyday in the second century A.D., with the cultural movement named as “Second Sophistic”. Despite the emphasis on rhetoric, literary culture lato senso was was also part of it, granting a special place to poetics and literary criticism. In the wake of this hermeneutical and interdisciplinary approach, the papers assembled in this volume explore significant issues, which are linked to the narrative structure of the ancient novel and to the tradition of rhetorical learning, both envisaged as a web of well-constructed narrative devices.
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Exemplarity and Narrative in the Greek Tradition (abridged)
This discussion starts from the encounter between Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24, and especially Achilles’ remarks on the jars of Zeus (525-35), the seminal expression of a characteristic Greek attitude towards the mutability of fortune and the instability of happiness. Such ideas can be readily paralleled in other cultures, literatures and narrative forms, both ancient and more recent, Greek and non-Greek. Their expression in language, symbol, and art (both verbal and visual) illustrates the way that the condensation of such complexes of thought and feeling in typical and traditional forms makes a particular ethical or emotional perspective tangible, tractable and transferable. These recurrent forms capture important aspects of a culture’s emotional and normative repertoire in a way that allows them to be reconstituted and applied in the mind of each recipient or audience member. The paper considers some of the implications of this in the Greek narrative tradition, from Homer, through archaic poetry, tragedy and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy to a detailed examination of the persistence of the phenomenon and its extensive influence on narrative shape in Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paullus, a splendid example of how later Greek narratives return explicitly to the most authoritative of all Greek narrative sources as a way of locating themselves in what their authors clearly regard as a distinctive Greek tradition.