‘From Novelistic Romance to Romantic Novel’: The Revival of the Ancient Adventure Chronotope in Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
THE ANCIENT NOVEL AND THE FRONTIERS OF GENRE, ANCIENT NARRATIVE Supplementum 18, 2014 ,
The Ancient Novel and the Frontiers of Genre, ed. Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, Gareth Schmeling, Edmund P. Cueva, 2014
Despite the fact that postmodern aesthetics deny the existence or validity of genres, the tendency nowadays is to assume that there was in Antiquity a homogeneous group of works of narrative prose fiction that, despite their differences, displayed a serious of recurrent, iterative, thematic, and formal characteristics, which allows us to label them novels. The papers assembled in this volume include extended prose narratives of all kind and thereby widen and enrich the scope of the canon. The essays explore a wide variety of texts, crossed genres, and hybrid forms, which transgress the boundaries of the so-called ancient novel, providing an excellent insight into different kinds of narrative prose in antiquity.
The Journal of Greco-Roman Studies, 2018
The present paper is an overview and discussion of Byzantine literary criticism concerning the ancient Greek novel from the ninth to the fifteenth century CE. More specifically, I focus here on the opinions and judgments of some of the most prominent Byzantine scholars as regards two fully extant Greek novels: Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Tale. I review in some detail various aspects of the ‘evaluation practice’ of Patriarch Photios I (ninth century CE) and Michael Psellos (eleventh century CE), and I also – though more briefly – go over the corresponding theories and ideas of (Philip-)Philagathus of Cerami (twelfth century CE) and Ioannis Eugenikos (fifteenth century CE). The main question I attempt to address in this study is how similarly or differently (even idiosyncratically) the Byzantines read and discussed the Greek novels over the centuries.
A workshop generously funded by the Sophia Scopetéa Fund to promote the study of Modern Greek at the University of Copenhagen. My paper is title "Narrative re-appropriations and the modality of the “Ottoman past” in Modern Greek fiction". For the purpose of answering the question of how the past is (re)imagined in contemporary literature, I bring to bear Hayden White’s conceit of plot as the meta-historical element of historiographic narration, a conceit that –taking into account recent reworkings and critisism– proves useful when employed in the analysis of fictional works that attempt to reconfigure the past / a “practical past” for the symbolic economy of the present. For the purposes of the workshop, I plan to focus on three works dealing more specifically with Enlightenment and its legacy: in the novels by Athina Kakouri (Tēs tychēis to machairi, 1989), Nikos Themelis (Gia mia syntrofia anamesa mas, 2005), and Thomas Skassis (To roloi tēs skias, 2004) the past / national history is emploted as a family novel and/or a bildungsroman· it is exactly this “ideology of form” that the paper will question.
Within the multiform field of ancient narrative fiction, a group of anonymous works may be distinguished, all of which were composed during the first centuries of the Roman Empire and share a series of common generic traits. These texts are (according to the titles used in present-day literary-historical research): the Life of Aesop, the Alexander Romance, the later Lives of Homer (including the Contest of Homer and Hesiod), the Story of Apollonius King of Tyre, and the brief Life of Secundus, the Silent Philosopher. All these works are characterised by a linear biographical narration and an open textual tradition, comprising many different redactions and versions in parallel circulation. The central hero and biographee is a kaleidoscopic personality, combining metis and linguistic proficiency with various other roles from the traditional narrative repertoire. All the texts under discussion also operate as multi-collective repositories of all kinds of narrative and gnomic genres (animal fables, novellas, anecdotes, travel legends, fictional epistles, riddles and conundrums, occasional epigrams, wise sayings and commandments, proverbs), which are intercalated into the narrative on various occasions. Above all, the main feature of these texts is their quasi-popular (λαϊκότροπη, “in the folk/popular manner”) aesthetic: the plot and characters are formed on the basis of traditional legends and folktale patterns, while the manner of narration is founded on the techniques of folk storytelling. In the academic year 2022-2023, I am teaching a postgraduate seminar on these works. I upload here a select bibliography of editions, commentaries, and important studies for each one of them, which I have prepared for the needs of the seminar and its participants. I have also added to the aforementioned works the so-called "Book of Syntipas", that great epigone of "Ahiqar" in the medieval period, which shares a number of common features with the "open" biographical romances of late antiquity. In the course of the seminar, we aspire to comparatively investigate the common traits of these works. We will also endeavour to highlight leading motifs and themes which occupy a significant place in poetic texture of the texts under discussion, from the manipulation of time, space, and narrative suspense to eroticism, intellectual contests, travel adventures, and the sagacious attitude towards death. The participants will perhaps come to realise that the sagacity of popularised storytelling is a reflection of the tragic experience in the mirror of the collective imaginary.