About the Book
Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies. Focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative, it triangulates ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches, opening up new vistas within the study of classical literature while ably deploying the ancient material to demonstrate the value of a historical perspective for cognitive studies. Concepts such as immersion and embodiment help to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory. The thirteen chapters presented here tackle a broad range of narrative genres, broadly understood: besides epic, historiography, and the novel, tragedy and early Christian texts are also considered alongside non-literary media, such as dance and sculpture. Authored by international specialists in the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece, each chapter utilizes a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools drawn from cognitive studies, phenomenology, and linguistics that place them at the vanguard of a strong new current in classical scholarship and literary criticism more generally.
Table of Contents:
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
0: Jonas Grethlein, Luuk Huitink, and Aldo Tagliabue: Narrative and Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Greece: An Introduction
Part I: Ancient Narrative
1: Rutger J. Allan: Narrative Immersion: Some Linguistic and Narratological Aspects
2: David Fearn: The Allure of Narrative in Greek Lyric Poetry
3: Felix Budelmann and Evert van Emde Boas: Attending to Tragic Messenger Speeches
4: Lisa I. Hau: Pathos with a Point: Reflections on 'Sensationalist' Narratives of Violence in Hellenistic Historiography in the Light of 21st-Century Historiography
5: Aldo Tagliabue: Experiencing the Church in the Book of Visions of the Shepherd of Hermas
Part II: Ancient Criticism
6: Jonas Grethlein: World and Words: The Limits to Mimesis and Immersion in Heliodorus' Ethiopica
7: Casper C. De Jonge: Longinus on Ecstasy: Author, Audience, and Text
8: Alex Purves: Rough Reading: Tangible Language in Dionysius' Criticism of Homer
9: Luuk Huitink: Enargeia and Bodily Mimesis
10: Alessandro Vatri: Asyndeton, Immersion, and Hypokrisis in Ancient Greek Rhetoric
Part III: Media and Context
11: Laura Gianvittorio: Dancing the War Report in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes
12: Nikolaus Dietrich: Narrative, Experience, and the Image: Incomplete Copies in Imperial Age Sculpture
13: Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi: Lived Aesthetics and the Inner Narrative
Endmatter
Works Cited
General Index
Index of Places
About the Author :
Jonas Grethlein holds the Chair in Greek Literature at Heidelberg University. He has been awarded the Maier-Leibnitz Prize, received an ERC starting grant, and was a Gerda Henkel Fellow at Brown University and a Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. His monographs include Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity: The Significance of Form in Narratives and Pictures (CUP, 2017), Die Odyssee: Homer und die Kunst des Erzählens (C. H. Beck,
2017), Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine (CUP, 2013), and The Greeks and their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE (CUP, 2010). Luuk Huitink is
currently employed as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics at Leiden University. He has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC Project 'Ancient Narrative' at Heidelberg University, Leventis Research Fellow in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford, and Spinoza Visiting Fellow at Leiden University. His work focuses on classical Greek prose, and in particular on intersections between linguistics, narratology, and cognition. Aldo Tagliabue is currently an Assistant Professor in
Classics at the University of Notre Dame. He has previously been a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC Project 'Ancient Narrative' at Heidelberg University, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics at the
University of Milan, and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Lampeter. His work focuses on ancient Greek narratives, and in particular on the Greek novels and the intersections between narrative, the divine, and experience.
Review :
the volume successfully introduces significant concepts of cognitive narratology into classics by covering diverse areas (ancient narratives, rhetorical treatises, sculpture, pottery). It is hoped that this volume in the series 'Cognitive Classics' will be the beginning for other, equally stimulating volumes.
I learned something new from every essay, all of which were, for the most part, admirably clear of jargon and engagingly written. Faced with a feast of such uniformly high quality, it is invidious to single out any one dish over another. That said, the stand-out essay, for me, is Alex Purves' wonderfully imaginative exploration of sticky, textural language in Homeric epic and its cognitive effects on the reader, which will form a core text in my Homer courses from now on. But it is a microcosm for the volume as a whole, which is a triumph in slow criticism.
This is a carefully prepared, clearly written and convincingly argued work with many worthy contributions, which offer fresh and exciting insights into a promising area of current research related to the cognitive sciences.
