Conference agenda
Over the past hundred years, Ancient Greek forms of storytelling have provided points of orientation for some of the key works on the history of narrative – including Walter Benjamin’s remarks on Herodotus’ story of Psammenitus as an example of “true storytelling” (which, in contrast to “information”, concentrates its strength and “is capable of releasing it even after a long time”), Albert Lord’s attempt to capture a poetics of epic emplotment (which, analogously to the operation of verbal formulae, involves elaboration of basic schemata), and Olga Freidenberg’s analysis of “static narrative” in choral odes of Attic tragedy (which progress through iteration and agglomeration of images).
The conference takes its starting point from an awareness of the multiplicity of forms and media for storytelling that arose, coexisted, and went out of use in Ancient Greece—an awareness that unsettles the structuralist/narratological/cognitivist assumption of the universality of narrative broadly construed (which is, as Barthes put it, “everywhere, like life itself”). In Ancient Greece, inherited lore (i.e. those stories and plots that are commonly referred to as “myths”) was subject to increasingly innovative reuse as well as devaluing critique; new varieties of storytelling that relied on prose came into existence; and popular and elite arts of telling stories, in different media, clashed and entered into alliances, some of which ended up sedimented as literary genres. Moreover, within a single literary form, a variety of often heterogeneous narrative devices evolved to serve different purposes (e.g. ways of producing enargeia in messenger speeches vs. choral odes in Attic tragedy; the use of kephalaion/recursive narrative vs. catalogue in choral lyric; the chronotopes of sudden, fortuitous encounter vs. ecphrastic pauses in ancient novel). In addition to debating narrative as a contested field of practice in Ancient Greece, conference participants will interrogate different methods and theoretical insights that could contribute to the writing of a comparative history of narrative forms.
Conference is funded by a Sather grant for UC Berkeley/Norway collaboration and convened by Professors Leslie Kurke and Boris Maslov.
Conference program:
https://dagrs.berkeley.edu/events/telling-stories-ancient-greece-day-1
https://dagrs.berkeley.edu/events/telling-stories-ancient-greece-day-2
This workshop, spearheaded by the Historical Poetics Working Group, takes on the challenge of theorizing literature as a symbolic form intimately implicated in the workings of historical time.
The temporal disparateness of literature, which often stages historical difference by juxtaposing the more and the less archaic (language, style, medium, mode of emplotment), has long been a key empirical focus of Historical Poetics. A possible speculative turn in the method, whose precise direction is to be debated at the Berkeley workshop, might involve reflection on the nature of historical temporality at times of perceived “crises” of modernities, which literary forms – in some cases even in spite of the particular work’s ostensible ideological tendency – anticipate, revel in, or otherwise register, if only because their endemic diachronic depth forbids the kind of naive synchronization that any modernity seeks to impose on historical time.
Moving beyond a notion of non-synchronicity as constitutive of both human temporality and of its artistic mediations, we will consider how literature imagines, enacts, or suspends the historical condition (broadly construed – as genre-driven patterns of exemplarity, as national historical consciousness, as meaningful series of individuated particulars, etc.) by employing distinct formal devices—both to build transhistorical communities of meaning-making and to evoke local presence-effects that may be said to contravene historical time.
An International Symposium, sponsored by the Peder Sather Center
UC Berkeley
February 23, 2024
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Co-organized by Susanna Elm (UC Berkeley) and Boris Maslov (University of Oslo)
When Alexander Herzen walked the streets of Italy in 1860s, he was appalled by the omnipresence of the past: one cannot pass a piazza without being made to feel bad that one does not “study” it (My Past and Thoughts, part VIII, ch. 1). Not all encounters with a culture’s past are meaningful or desirable, some even amount to dangerous provocations. Indeed, modernity has cultivated a penchant for decrying traditions “of all dead generations” that “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, ch. 1). And nevertheless, humanistic research has retained a commitment to enabling conversations with the past, perhaps because they have proven essential, or unavoidable, in the making of a socio-politically viable and resilient present.
This symposium brings together historians, philologists, and literary scholars who will explore the various methodological challenges and intellectual opportunities enabled by their disciplines for constructing transhistorical communities of interest or affect. Particular issues that will occupy us are the continuities between (and compatibility of) ancient, Medieval and modern forms of humanistic knowledge that build bridges between authors, commentators, and readers; modes of impeding or promoting transhistorical communities; formal resources that enable some genres of discourse to make various pasts stereoscopically co-present.
Program
8:45 Tea/coffee, Introductions
Morning panel: Serendipitous Communities
Chairs: Susanna Elm (UC Berkeley), Timothy Hampton (UC Berkeley)
9:00-10:00 Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University)
“Chance Readers, or the Uses of Coincidence”
Background readings: Cicero, On Divination (excerpt), trans. D. Wardle; Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, “Parapraxes,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XV, pp. 40-59.
10:00-11:00 Boris Maslov (University of Oslo)
“The Ancients and the Moderns in Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments”
Background reading: Plutarch, How to Study Poetry (How a Young Person Should Listen to Poets), 34b-37b = 13-14, trans. F. C. Babbitt.
11:00-11:15 Coffee break
11:15-12:15 Niklaus Largier (UC Berkeley)
“The Rhetoric of Prayer”
Background reading: Hugh of St. Victor, “On the Power of Prayer,” trans. Hugh Feiss Osb
1215-1430 Lunch for the participants (location TBA)
Afternoon panel: Antiquity’s Resources
Chairs: Diliana Angelova (UC Berkeley), Boris Maslov (University of Oslo)
14:30-15:30 Maria Mavroudi (UC Berkeley)
“Historicized and a-historical approaches to medieval autobiography and selfhood: philology and philosophies of history as tools”
Background reading: Glenn Most, “The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung,” in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. Anne Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing (Brill, 2016), 933–954.
15:30-16:30 Christopher Siwicki (University of Oslo)
“Valuing historic architecture, between today and antiquity”
Background readings: Vitruvius, Bk. 7 (an excerpt); David C. Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: temporality, meaning and the scope of heritage studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7.4 (2001): 319-338.
1630-1645 Coffee break
1645-1745 James Ker (University of Pennsylvania)
“Seneca and the Times of Consolation”
Background reading: Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam (an excerpt)