ANCIENT POETICS (original) (raw)
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Contemporary Approaches to Mesopotamian Literature: How to Tell a Story, 2024
This chapter lays theoretical and methodological groundwork for the contemporary analysis of Sumerian and Akkadian narratives. It begins with an introduction to the unique features of the cuneiform literary corpus; the new online tools, databases, and publications that are rendering Sumerian and Akkadian narratives increasingly accessible; and key terms, definitions, and issues of classification and genre as they pertain to Mesopotamian literary texts. Much of the central part of the chapter is dedicated to a consideration of the “lives” of Mesopotamian literary texts, from the earliest known written narratives in the third millennium BCE to some of the standardized compositions of the late second and first millennium BCE, as well as to issues of authorship. The chapter concludes with an outline of key contemporary approaches to Sumerian and Akkadian narratives as drawn from literary theory, beginning with an emphasis on narratological and intertextual approaches and concluding with approaches drawn from theories of the novel and of fiction.
Quotation as a Basis for Intertextuality in Sumerian Cult Lyric and City Laments
Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review (DABIR), 2022
This short communication investigates the concept of intertextuality in Sumerian literary texts, by studying the use of quotations in cult lyric and so-called City Laments. These text genres exhibit a series of intertextual borrowings, and the aim of this study is to discuss some examples of the use of quotations in these texts, as one of the most basic and important features of intertextuality in Sumerian literature.
2019
The reconstruction of what can be called Classical Sumerian literature, viz. the materials used for instruction in the Old Babylonian Tablet House {é-dub-ba-a}, represents one of most important achievements in the humanities since the Second World War. And while the edition of still unedited compositions is crucial, an equally pressing desideratum is an ‘internal history’ of the different compositions that make up this corpus. Some important steps toward an emic history of Sumerian literature have been made over the past half-century, largely through the reconstruction of the curriculum, but in this paper I offer a new metric for evaluating the relative position of each composition within the Classical Sumerian corpus. One of the most productive ideas within linguistic anthropology over the past two decades has been the notion of metapragmatic awareness, a measure of the degree to which participants in a social interaction are aware of the appropriateness, effectiveness or discursive force of the pragmatic acts that they perform through speech, gesture, facial expressions and so on. Participant awareness of certain kinds of grammatical constructions forms a small part of the overall phenomenon of metapragmatic awareness, but it is particularly important in evaluating the relative age of Sumerian literary compositions, since as I argue in this paper, cross-cultural limits on certain kinds of metapragmatic awareness, especially vis-à-vis grammatical categorization, can be used to identity particular grammatical constructions that native speakers would not normally be able to identify. Once we have identified certain elements of Sumerian grammar that are “below the radar” of tradents, we can use the presence of these grammatical features to single out compositions that were composed by Sumerian native speakers and juxtapose these compositions to others than lack these diagnostic grammatical constructions and must have been composed by non-native speakers who were emulating classical literary norms in established compositions.
M. Díaz de Cerio Díez, C. Cabrillana & C. Criado (eds.), Ancient Epic. Literary and Linguistic Essays, New Castle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-4438-7421-2., 2015
This book adopts a broad and multifaceted approach to that most preeminent of classical literature genres: the Epic. Set in the ancient world, from archaic Greece to imperial Rome, the scope of interest here extends, for comparative purposes, to Vedic and Sanskrit poetry, as well as the Medieval epic. This collection of papers by classicists from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, embraces key themes in recent scholarship, such as the character of the hero, defined in terms of the conflict of power central to the epos, the metapoetic function of the bard as a literary reflection of epic style, and the manipulation of epic myth to fulfil new functions, such as retelling contemporary history and conveying mystic symbology. Topics rooted in archaic poetry, such as the reutilisation of the ogre character embodied in the Cyclops and the journey into the Underworld, are also explored in great detail. In all these studies, the intertextual nature of ancient writing is consistently addressed through discussions of the revisiting of Homeric poetry by authors such as the Greek tragedians, Empedocles, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Valerius Flaccus. The analysis of the heroic narrative offered in this volume includes both literary phenomena and the language of the epic itself; the reader is thus afforded the widest possible view of current critical perspectives in classical literature and linguistics. Such a comprehensive treatment of the most important genre in the ancient world grants the reader powerful insights into the way in which ancient literature was composed. This collection of studies, while making a substantial contribution to scholarship in this field, will also appeal to a varied academic readership, including researchers in classical literature and linguistics, as well as students of literary theory.