From Song to Book: Performance and Entextualisation in Ancient Greek Literature and Beyond

29 juin-1er juillet 2016, Londres

UCL, London, England
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/classics/events/2016-SongtoBook
CFP deadline: 1 Feb 2016

The Department of Greek and Latin at UCL and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies will host a comparative conference on entextualisation. Since Europeans began to explore the world outside Eurasia,  the ancient Greek experience of literacy was a paradigm in  the West's understanding of what literacy is. In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly challenged the older notion of a linear development from oral to written culture. Entextualisation is increasingly understood not as a single cultural process, but rather a variety of different ones with specific social aims and consequences; and performance studies has introduced new ways of understanding how different texts and genres construct a speaking voice. We aim to create bridges between Classicists and colleagues working in a variety of other fields, from mediaeval and Renaissance studies, to anthropology, philosophy and ethnomusicology, to see how our methods can inform each others' approaches. Keynote speakers will include Richard Janko and Niall Slater. Papers will be forty minutes, followed by discussion. Suggestions for topics include, but are not limited to:

• How might a genre which starts out as performative change and develop as it becomes increasingly encoded in a textual form?

•  How does entextualisation impact on musical performance traditions and genres?

•  When and why are genres entextualised?

•  How does the move from performance to entextualisation alter the way in which a genre or a poet constructs the authorial voice?

•  How does the regime of performance and textuality differ between poetry and prose? Does the shifting relationship between poetry and prose over time affect the conception of textual voice?  Can we find analogies for the development of prose in other cultures?

•  How does performance culture impact on forms of entextualisation and textual transmission? What is a text? What are its qualities? How stable is it?

Inquiries and paper ideas: fromsongtobook2016 -at- gmail.com.