Poetic and performative memory in ancient Greece / Claude Calame ; translated from the French by Harlan Patton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Calame, Claude.

Series:

Hellenic studies ; 18.

Hellenic studies ; 18

Standardized Title:

Pratiques poétiques de la mémoire. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Greek poetry--History and criticism.

Greek poetry.

Space and time in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 267 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Washington, D.C. : Center for Hellenic Stuides, Trustees for Harvard University ; Cambridge, Mass. : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009.

Summary:

Philosophers have often reflected on the Ancient Greeks' concepts of time, but an anthropological approach is necessary to understand their practical concept of time as tied to space. The Greeks not only spoke of time unfolding in a specific space, but also projected the past upon the future in order to make it active in the social practice of the present. Hesiod's history of humanity was intended to establish justice in the modern city; Bacchylides sang the celebration of the Athenian hero Theseus in a present-day cultic and ideological framework; the city of Cyrene used the heroic act of its founding to reaffirm its civic identity; and the Greeks embossed poetic texts on leaves of gold to ensure the ritual passage of the dead to a blessed afterlife. Explicating these examples, "Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece" shows how the Ancient Greeks' collective memory was based on a remarkable faculty for the creation of ritual and narrative symbols.

Contents:

Spatio-temporal poetics of the past in Ancient Greece

The succession of ages and poetic pragmatics of justice: Hesiod's narrative of the five human species

Gender and heroic identity between legend and cult: the political creation of Theseus by Bacchylides

Regimes of historicity and oracular logic: how to re-found a colonial city

Ritual and initiatory itineraries toward the afterlife: time, space, and pragmatics in the gold lamellae

By way of conclusion: returns to the present.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674021242

067402124X

OCLC:

217263944